Stop targeting the young

Ilya Somin has a perceptive comment about the various proposals that knocking around Capitol Hill to require some sort of service from young people. He wonders why such programs target only the young instead of more elderly people.

Indeed, the moral case for conscripting the elderly for civilian service is arguably stronger than that for drafting the young. Many elderly people are healthy enough to perform nonstrenuous forms of "national service." Unlike the young, the elderly usually won't have to postpone careers, marriage and educational opportunities to fulfill their forced-labor obligations. Moreover, the elderly, to a far greater extent than the young, are beneficiaries of massive government redistributive programs, such as Social Security and Medicare--programs that transfer enormous amounts of wealth from other age groups to themselves. Nonelderly poor people who receive welfare benefits are required to work (or at least be looking for work) under the 1996 welfare reform law; it stands to reason that the elderly (most of whom are far from poor) can be required to work for the vastly larger government benefits that they receive.

There are all sorts of reasons that requiring the elderly to give such national service makes more sense than taking young people away from the start of their careers. Somin guesses, rightly I believe, that these programs target the young because they are not as politically active in the same numbers as the elderly.

And whatever the validity of the general view that the young should spend more time on political activity, I hope we can agree that forced labor is not a proper punishment for spending too little time on politics.

Now some might argue that public service is required of the young more as a character-building requirement than for the value of the actual service. And I would respond, is the government really in the job of building character for adults?