That’s what University of Virginia professor Larry Sabato wants to do. Of course he does not say so in so many words*, but that’s exactly what one of his proposals for amending the Constitution would amount to. In his latest book, A More Perfect Constitution, Sabato proposes 23 changes to the Constitution, many of which are backed by solid good sense. But one of them would be to impose a “national service” requirement on all “young people.” He’s flexible, of course, on how such service could be rendered—various occupations which he considers morally worthy would qualify as acceptable ways to spend this period of servitude—but he is inflexible on his belief that every young citizen of the United States should be forced into involuntary servitude without the commission of a crime, in direct contradiction to the Thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution.
“Exceptions,” he writes, should be “almost nonexistent.” And to enforce this proposal, he suggests revamping the military draft: “all young people would register for national service when they turn seventeen years of age (replacing draft registration at age eighteen),” he writes. “High schools would help to secure compliance.... The ‘draft board’ concept would also need to be fully reactivated.” And this draft board would be charged with entertaining “the rare request[s] to be excused” as well as “entreaties to delay service because of serious family circumstances,” which delays “would be temporary.”
Sabato tries hard to disguise the fact that what he is proposing is to force people against their will to give up years of their lives to the state, in this supposed land of the free: that is, to render involuntary servitude without being convicted of a crime. He is, for example, entirely silent so far as I can tell about what he would do to people who refuse to serve. Presumably it would be a crime to say that you would prefer to devote your time to your own pursuit of happiness—a right which this country’s founding document declares to be inalienable. Sabato would use the state’s coercive power to throw people in jail for nothing more than going into the peaceful business of earning a living and pursuing their dreams instead of doing what he would rather see them do—and without even the rather poor excuse of national security offered by the military draft.
Instead, he goes on about the advantages to be gained from this forced “volunteering.” No doubt he’s right that there would be “relatively little cost” to the nation in financial terms, since he proposes to pay these concscripts basically minimum wage. Slavery is, of course, always more profitable to the master than would be voluntary employment contracts. (He is silent, however, on the costs of enforcement, since he is silent about enforcement itself.) That’s because it is the proposal that “you work, and I’ll eat. You labor, and I will enjoy the fruits of it.”
It was to bar the moral evil of those sentences that the Thirteenth Amendment was added to the Constitution, forbidding the government from imposing involuntary servitude on people except in punishment for a crime. I am fully aware that courts have declared that involuntary servitude for young people is not involuntary servitude; these cases have obviously been wrongly decided, as was another famous involuntary servitude case in 1857. What's more, these decisions have been predicated in part on the possibility of escaping such servitude:
the level of coercion is not so high as to compel a finding of involuntary servitude. Although students who forego their required service will not graduate, they may avoid the program and its penalties by attending private school, transferring to another public high school, or studying at home to achieve a high school equivalency certificate. While these choices may be economically or psychologically painful, choices they are, nonetheless. They might not render the program voluntary, but they contribute to the conclusion that it is not involuntary servitude.
Sabato's proposal, of course, would close off any such avenues of escape.
Yet what is astonishing is that Professor Sabato does not address these considerations at all in his book. Instead, he writes that “A society dedicated entirely to individual pursuits, without concern for the welfare of the whole body of citizens, is soulless.”
He skims neatly over the implications of these sentences. We cannot. A free society is not soulless, but one of many diverse souls—one in which each individual is free “to regulate his own pursuits of industry and improvement,” to pursue his dreams and care for himself and his family and his loved ones in freedom and peace. Any man who cannot see the soulful value of such a world is himself deaf to the principles of American republicanism, and to the despair of those who would be denied this right by the principles he espouses—the principle that the state may force into servitude people who would rather do something else with their lives. And how dare Sabato assume that their dreams are “soulless,” or empty pursuits? As he well knows, it is the young in particular who are dreamers, idealists, rebels who often set out on quests to change the world—quests of their own devising. And such quests do, in fact, raise all boats—as the wealth of the entire world was immeasurably increased by a college dropout named Bill Gates who had ideas of his own to pursue instead of servitude in one of Prof. Sabato’s non-profit enterprises. To Sabato, the pursuit of the young entrepreneur who undertakes the hard work to chase his own dreams, often in the face of opposition from a cynical world or a hostile family—work that will not only support him, if successful, but his family and his community—is all just soulless, degraded, profit-making chintz. He scorns the principle that all people have the right to pursue happiness, because he scorns happiness. And thus he must scorn the desire for freedom.
“The truth is that, given human nature, a purely voluntary regime of service means that a few will give a lot, a fair number will give some, and many will contribute nothing,” he writes. “The unfairness of this situation is obvious.”
Obvious, Prof. Sabato? In what way is it obvious to describe as “unfair” a situation in which people are free to decide whether or not to participate in enterprises of their own choosing? In what way is it “obviously” unfair to say to a person that if he wants to organize an effort at community service he must persuade others to join him voluntarily? In what way is it “obviously” more fair to force people against their will to toil as you want them to, to shut down their own pursuits for two years and to obey, instead? People who have never committed an injustice against you, who have not asked for you to serve their desires—people who are innocent of any crime, but people whom you see as pliable instruments of the national will, full of energy that could be devoted to causes the government considers worthwhile?
It is no doubt true that most young people will not devote their lives to any great undertaking or pursuit. This is no argument that those who do should be barred. Nor is it any reason to scorn the humble pursuits of those who would rather live their own lives in tranquil obscurity. The fact that Prof. Sabato has less respect for the high school graduate who would prefer to become a carpenter or an auto mechanic than he does for the busy volunteer is no argument that the former should be forced to imitate the latter.
But let us grant all that Prof. Sabato says—at great and tedious length—about the wonderful rewards that come from working in a volunteer cause to aid others. Let us assume he is right that working in a non-profit organization is a good and noble thing. I, in fact, do such a thing myself, and love the doing of it, and think it is indeed as ennobling as he says. How dare he suggest that because he considers it worthwhile he need not convince others of that worthiness? How dare he suggest that because he believes it ennobling, he will undertake to ennoble others against their will? How dare he suggest that the state take away the liberty of people who—whether rightly or wrongly—would rather not participate?
And if the nobility of an enterprise is, as Sabato argues, sufficient to justify ignoring the moral difference between consent and non-consent, then why stop at “young people”? Surely there are ways that others could render valuable service to the nation if only they were deprived of any say in the matter! The answer, of course, is that young people are easier to impose upon—having not only less voting power, but in fact no power to vote at all in what Sabato proposes, since he would force them to register for his draft at seventeen, before they attain the age where they could vote against his suggestion.
Mr. Sabato avoids, without rebutting, what he is pleased to label the “libertarian excess” that holds that “‘the right to be left alone’ is paramount in a free democratic society.” It is not only paramount to a free democratic society, Professor, it is paramount to our society—a society based on the individual’s right to pursue his own happiness without the interference of others, and certainly without the interference of the state. Yet Sabato would undertake to violate this sacred principle in order to teach people the values of American citizenship?
In fact, if anyone needs an education in the principles of American citizenship, it is Larry Sabato, who does not understand that “all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
*-Sabato is fully aware that his proposal conflicts with the Amendment, however. Otherwise he would frame his proposal as a mere statute. The fact that he argues for adding it as a constitutional amendment proves he is aware that it would conflict with the Constitution's current guarantees of liberty.
