First, the question of age. "If national service is so good," notes The Economist, "everyone should do it." But the proposal is never thus universalized. It's always limited to young adults, which is an odd thing if the motivation, as Buttigieg says, is not military defense — where age may be relevant for its link to physical fitness — but renewed social cohesion. Don't older generations need to meet "very different Americans," too?
This puzzle isn't difficult to solve. Older adults "conclude, reasonably enough, that the benefit to society is not worth the cost to their personal liberty." Thus polling finds support for mandatory service is related to age in a perfect inverse: The older you are, the more likely you are to endorse Buttigieg's plan — which is to say, the safer you are from losing a year of your youth to the federal government, the more likely you are to say other people should lose a year of theirs. This difference is not the product of wisdom. It is selfishness cloaked in a costless pretense of civic virtue.
As for that cost to personal liberty, Buttigieg's focus on domestic over military service only negates some of the ethical dilemma for potential conscripts. All of the offense to the rights of the individual inherent to the draft remain. A service requirement doesn't have to force anyone to go to war to be an illegitimate seizure of our time and freedom to use it as we choose.
I don't often find myself quoting former President Ronald Reagan, but he was entirely correct in condemningcompulsory national service for its "assumption that your kids belong to the state. If we buy that assumption then it is for the state — not for parents, the community, the religious institutions, or teachers — to decide who shall have what values and who shall do what work, when, where, and how in our society."
That question of what work should be done by our youthful conscripts is equally worth consideration. It does not take much imagination to realize what national service kids would be doing right now if such a program existed. In our present state of so-called national emergency, they would almost certainly be sent to southern Texas for construction work, and President Trump's border wall construction would be proceeding at a rather faster pace than it is now.
https://theweek.com/articles/835755/mandatory-national-service-terrible-idea
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