Veteran of the Reagan Administration, Bruce Chapman has battled against the idea of Universal National Service for a half a century.
In an article over at The American Spectator, he informs us that attendees at the exclusive summit going on right now at the Aspen Institute in Colorado are meeting to decide not if there should be some kind of Universal National Service, but how it should be implemented. As he reports:
The Summit was called not so much to consider and weigh such a scheme as to mobilize in support of it. If there were any critics of universal national service invited to Aspen, the invitation list doesn’t show them.
The people attending the conference include politicians, businessmen, members of the media, both Republican and Democrat, Left and supposed Right.
Mr. Chapman reports:
…Now, according to Aspen’s official Summit description, it appears that backers are willing to settle for something less [than a draft system], but still vast: a new “National Service System that will offer at least one million full-time civilian national service opportunities…on par with the more than one million Americans who serve on active duty in our Armed Forces.”
Compulsion is not very popular in peacetime, so the obligation to “volunteer,” according to Aspen leader Gen. Stanley McChrystal (Ret.), only will be “socially mandatory,” the way many high schools and colleges these days require performance of “service” in order to graduate.
Such a system, as he points out, ‘is only considered voluntary by Orwellians’. Indeed. Try and evade school system ‘community service’ requirements and you will be denied a high school diploma.
The Summit attendees are smart enough to realize that some sort of financial incentive has to be offered in this day and age:
…As a reward for a year’s service, participants would receive something over $12,500 (the AmeriCorps rate today for 11 months) and $5,000, one understands, to help reduce college loans.
The taxpayers, who have so little else to do with their money anymore, will foot the bill. To the salaries and scholarship rewards you can add training costs, certain housing, food, and transportation expenses, insurance and government overhead. There will be many jobs for new bureaucrats to operate the program. You are looking at $30,000 per “volunteer,” at least — or a new program of $30 billion (30k X 1million). That’s only for starters.
But that is what the Summit’s sponsors and participants — such as JPMorgan Chase, Target stores, Bank of America, State Farm Insurance, Burson-Marsteller public relations, the Case Foundation, Bruce Reed (Vice President Biden’s Chief of Staff), other Obama Administration officials, Chelsea Clinton, Barbara Bush (GWB’s daughter), Maria Shriver, Arianna Huffington, the CEOs of PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, such media stars as Michael Gerson and E. J. Dionne of the Washington Post, former-advisor-to-everyone David Gergen, and a high end assortment of editors, college presidents, progressive theologians, and trade association and think tank nabobs — apparently want the public to sign up for.
This Summit is a shining example of the Corporatist / Fascist Mindset at work.
And that mindset is a cunning one:
…One can expect opportunistic advertisements out of Aspen for national service as a means to solve today’s youth unemployment problem and the burden of student loans, not to mention whatever-ails-you.
How nice.
More from Bruce Chapman:
I have been an opponent of universal national service for nearly a half century. Some of my earliest allies were Milton Friedman, Martin Anderson, Donald Rumsfeld and Bob Bartley. We all saw that to the extent universal national service is idealistic it is misconceived. From an economic standpoint, it is a wasteful tax on time. Socially speaking, it is a disguised welfare program. Politically it is a way to supply workers for government-favored organizations.
It is actually much worse that he imagines.
Universal National Service is a way to indoctrinate an already supple set of young minds in Leftist Thinking. It is a way to organize a Communist Youth-like organization of Commissars enthusiastically willing to go out in the communities of America and aid the government in keeping the people in line, via snitching and, if necessary, action against us [to be 'the eyes and ears of the Revolution', as it were]. I have no doubt they will, like certain employees of the Department Of Education, IRS, etc., be trained in law enforcement procedures, such as SWAT tactics, utilizing firearms.
The Left and the Useful Idiots of the Right must not be allowed to implement Universal National Service. Our children belong to us. It is bad enough so many of us have allowed them to be indoctrinated in Leftist Thinking by the public and private school systems of this country. We don’t need our offspring recruited into a Real World version of the Party Youth League.
A Final Thought: Perhaps the Leftists in power have come to believe that they cannot trust the majority of the U.S. Armed Forces to do their bidding and carry-out the government sanctioned thuggery that’s planned, so they are determined to form their own force that is loyal to them. Let’s face it: no twisted idea is beyond the imaginations of this crew. Of course, to be fair, they have the examples set in places like the Soviet Union, Red China, and Nazi Germany that show it can be successfully done.
Welcome To The Jungle.
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SIDENOTE: It should be noted that Mr. Chapman gives us no hints in his well-done report that he agrees with any of my analysis and commentary as presented here. I think, in fact, he’s a bit to sanguine about this issue, but he is certainly not an ostrich [witness such statements as: 'Of course, it always has been the intention of statists to get the central government to tell young people what to do with their lives' and 'It is, finally, a way to defer adulthood even further']; rather, like so many others on the Right, he has still not yet woken-up to just how dangerous the Leftist threat in America is and how grave our situation has become.
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