National Service Requirements?

Except only poor people and people of color will die while all the rich people will get exemptions. A draft only punishes the working class. And no, it won’t make the government less trigger happy.

How about we have guaranteed universal income.

But… you get more if you served.

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Okay, we’re not that far off. I’m in the “no-default” camp, as in, when you sign up for service, you see a list of all your options and choose which one you feel suits you best, adjusting for other factors such as physical/psychological limitations that may rule out particular forms of service.

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If you refuse to serve, you could always just serve that time in jail, but still get full benefits upon exiting :wink:

If we bring back the draft, obviously it needs to be done without an exemptions system that can be abused by the privileged. But I’m only talking about hypotheticals here.

It’s funny you mention only poor people and people of color dying. They already are the majority of those who are dying. Also a lot of the people clamoring to bring back the draft happen either come from poor backgrounds and/or are people of color themselves because of that.

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We already force children to go to school. There are punishments for not going to school. It’s call truancy. Public service would just be two more years where you must not be truant.

The bottom line is that means testing government benefits is just an extra tax on working class people. Rich people will never have to serve because they will never have to need the extra money from a universal income. It also bifurcates the classes even more since opportunity losses from having to spend your youth in service will prevent lots of opportunities when one is younger.

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You’re comparing this hypothetical system to our past draft system, where, yes, the rich got exemptions. Since this is just a thought experiment, under the hypothetical system, there would be no exemptions, and because there are non-military options available, you wouldn’t need to come up with bullshit excuses not to be drafted because you could just do something else.

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Right, maybe we should be providing the benefits to all people instead of requiring them to join the military.

Hence why I mentioned options other than just joining the military. You can serve in AmeriCorps, or the Peace Corps, or perhaps spend some time volunteering as a tutor to poor inner city children through an appropriate organization or something like that.

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Or how about we just give it to everyone. No questions asked.

Maybe you have until, like, 40, to do your service.

I would say even if you want to do the military you should still have to do a 2-year Civic service as a pre-requisite, unless you get sponsorship thru something like JROTC to go direct military.

The reason why we do this is to get people out of their isolated islands and get them to interact with their fellow Americans (or people of the country they happen to be living in). In some cases, such as the Peace Corps, it can be with people from outside their country as well.

It’s the whole “carrot and stick” thing. To get people to serve and experience life outside of their insular communities, we need to give them some sort of benefit to doing so that makes it worth their while. The idea that it’s a net positive for all involved provided that everyone does it.

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This is pretty much the situation in Israel. Anyone who hasn’t served in the military, and doesn’t have a good excuse, is basically ostracized and looked down upon.

Take that concept and apply it to both the military and non-military organizations under this hypothetical system. Sure, you don’t have to participate, but it will be a “black mark” that you’ll live with for the rest of your life. Or maybe there’s even an option where you can join later on in life to remove the stigma.

In Korea the rich people serve. Well, the males, but we won’t discriminate here in the US.

They have a culture such that regardless of the actual legal penalties of failing to serve, people are socially ostracized if they try to cheat their way out of it. PSY served, but there was a technicality and it didn’t count. He went back and served AGAIN. The social penalty of being someone who tried to get out of service is enormous and is really the only deterrent necessary.

Examples:

https://www.soompi.com/article/913125wpp/kim-jong-kook-enough-people-judging-not-serving-military

Right now, four out of five members of BIGBANG are in the military. They are all extremely wealthy. BTS, the biggest boy band on the planet, is going to serve sometime soon. There is no avoiding it.

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Rich people will never have to leave their bubbles since they will never need tuition assistance nor public housing. And poor people will be forced to enter government service just to subsist.

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Or maybe you can do it part time in your youth provided you sign up for a commitment to complete your overall length of service such that it’s the same amount of time as anyone else.

For example, let’s say you are a college student who serves a weekend every month and over summer break while you are in school. You may not fulfill the service requirements before graduation, but you may be able to take your knowledge to apply towards your service after graduation. If you have a CS degree, maybe you can teach programming to inner city kids. If you’re a doctor, maybe you can work at a community health center (although that may not be as much of a big deal with universal health care). But hopefully you get the idea.

Then they may need to be penalized in some way. “Carrot and stick” again. Poor people get the “carrot” to serve, rich people get the “stick”.

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I 100% guarantee you that they will never get the stick. Furthermore, mandatory govt. service is not a carrot. It’s servitude.

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