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I mean a national labor corps with incentivized participation isn't the worst idea. Gives people the opportunity to get work experience without necessarily having to understand their career direction in life.
Shouldn't be a draft in any circumstances but absolute crisis situation, like essential infrastructure is on the brink of total collapse and regular pay incentives aren't getting bodies on it fast enough.
Who knows, might get some people into work they didn't realize they'd gel with, plenty of inspector positions are behind work load and I've got s feeling a part of that is just people not knowing the work is out there.
I'd be super on board for this. Treat it similarly to the military, where room and board are provided, and they ship you to an underserved part of the country to help.
Especially if we extended the GI Bill to cover participating. Like, do 4 yrs and you get full tuition covered at any public university.
I think it would really promote national unity and help to lift people out of poverty. You'd have people from all over the country working together, bridging a lot of our internal divisions. You'd get people out of their bubbles and echo chambers and have them actually seeing the country.
If we could normalize it, where it's just what people did after highschool, it would give people time to figure their lives out. Remove the pressure of having to choose a career right away. I know so many people who "had to go to college" because that was the next step, but didn't have a clue what they wanted in life, so got useless majors and have dead ended. This would be perfect for people like that.
Plus infrastructure in the US is a joke. And even as the OP implies, farming is a broken business in the US for a number of reasons. There are never enough people working soup kitchens and food pantries, or cleaning up our national forests to prevent forest fires. If we could mobilize our young people en masse, we could make a huge difference in this country.
I'm 1000% on board.
Yeah that's all fine but it's blocked by one of two major political parties in the US doesn't believe government should exist. At best they'd support a privatized version of the that siphoned money out and didn't help people that need help.
We're going to struggle to get anything done as long as conservatives are treated as if they have any merit.
No, I think that's actually the beauty of this. The OP meme is a right wing meme. A national civil service is a right wing position.
I think there's a way to craft this program in a hugely bipartisan way. You get all the "patriotism, one nation, farms and country" stuff the right wants, and all the "infrastructure improvements, social safety nets, free college" stuff the left wants.
I think there's a real potential to get some solid bipartisanism here.
Isn't it basically similar to the public work projects of the "New Deal"?
Without a draft it's just a Keynsian jobs program like CCC or Teach for America. Not the worst idea in the world.
I heard in Finland it’s kinda like this. You have to do something like a year in the military or a year in civil service and I like it. Don’t want to do the military? Fine, do the postal service or some shit just do something. It’s like a great equalizer since rich and poor have to do it and they all have the same options.
Nah, fuck conscription, people only have a limited time in this world and you shouldn't be forced to waste it on the military/civil service. The options should be there if you want to take them, make it appealing if you want, but no one should be forced into any service.
With Finland it's seen as a social necessity because they're neighbors with Russia.
Perhaps they will reconsider the 'need' for it with their new NATO membership. Will be hard to remove something so ingrained in their culture though.
I doubt it, but maybe. They're still what amounts to a front line territory.
The United States has had the luxury of an all-volunteer military for slightly longer than I've been alive. My name went on the Selective Service roster. They keep that list. They're having recruitment and retention problems. And the United States has a much bigger population than the likes of Finland.
We had recruiting problems because we had unrealistic medical standards. For decades people just lied about what they could. Then we decided to use a system that could actually check the records of recruits.
Once waivers were made easily available, instead of months of admin work, recruiting goals were magically met again.
I already think some kind of required (paid) community service year should be required for every citizen, so I guess part of that could be agriculture.
Required I think doesn't cut mustard, like I said, it should be required only when all other possibilities to address a labor shortage crisis have been exhausted.
Required service is something you do when you're in a weakened or threatened position with what you're invoking it for, so doing it unnecessarily just doesn't help quite as much as one might think.
There's better ways to address a perceived national attitude problem than forced labor.
We are in a weakened, threatened position. 🤪
There's great arguments here about how a service corps could bridge divides and give all youth a better pathway from highschool into the (often predatory) worlds of job markets and higher ed, and also great arguments about why mandatory service infringes on freedom pretty significantly.
Is there a way to structure a national year of service idea that gives people the freedom to opt out yet would still get chosen by many kids from diverse backgrounds? Like how do we get kids who have had a college fund ready to go since they were born to see the benefits of spending a year building bridges? It would be a neat cultural shift.
Probably from social isolation by everyone who did do that.
Like if the rich asshole kids wanna mark themselves out by skipping out on a national service that's their prerogative, just the same it's everyone else's to make judgements about them based on that.
That "some of y'all never worked a service job and it shows" tweet hits a lot harder when there's a federal budget for the messaging about the good of lending a working hand to your fellow countryfolks.