Principled Perspectives: Conscription

Showing posts with label Conscription. Show all posts

Friday, December 18, 2020

Dems Want to Remove the 13th Amendment’s ‘Exception’ to the Ban on Slavery: Fine. Why Stop There?

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. [Emphasis added.]

Thus did America formally abolish slavery in the United States, with that one exception. Now some lawmakers want to amend the 13th Amendment to do away with that exception.

CNN reports that Democratic lawmakers introduce[d] a resolution to amend the 13th Amendment to end forced prison labor:

Congressional Democrats want to amend a section of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, to end what they refer to as another form of slavery -- forced prison labor.

Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Rep. William Lacy Clay of Missouri introduced a joint resolution this week that would remove the 13th Amendment's "punishment clause," or language that excepted convicted prisoners from the ban on slavery and involuntary servitude.

"Our 'Abolition Amendment' seeks to finish the job that President Lincoln started by ending the punishment clause in the 13th Amendment to eliminate the dehumanizing and discriminatory forced labor of prisoners for profit that has been used to drive the over-incarceration of African Americans since the end of the Civil War," Clay said in a statement.

CNN goes on to explain that the “punishment clause,” also known as the “exception clause,” was a loophole that created a pretext for the Jim Crow South to convict blacks on trumped-up charges in order to re-enslave them. Senator Jeff Merkley called the "punishment clause" in the 13th Amendment “indisputably racist in origin and in impact.” It’s doubtful the crafters of the 13th Amendment had racist motives. Perhaps some did. But the 13th Amendment was the culmination of the Abolitionist Movement, which was rooted in the Declaration of Independence’s Equality of Rights principle But the perverse incentives that the “punishment clause” introduced cannot be denied, in my view.

I am not well-informed on the pros and cons of eliminating the punishment clause. But my “instinct” is to lean toward supporting its removal, especially given that the architects of the new amendment would allow “work programs for prisoners [to] continue on a voluntary basis.”

However, the Democrats’ resolution raises wider questions. Why outlaw forced labor only for convicts? Why should not-for-profit forced labor be continued? Why should forced labor be legal for non-convicts? I have in mind two widely supported not-for-profit, non-convict examples of forced labor—one proposed, one already implemented; mandatory universal national service and mandatory community service as a condition for high school graduation.

No amount of mental acrobatics or rationalization can shroud the fact that both mandatory national service and mandatory community service is forced, and therefore slave, labor. Given that most states have some form of high school community service requirements, and that mandatory national service had wide support among the Democrats’ 2020 presidential nomination field, and that half of Americans support it, I’d like to know on what basis anyone can support the removal of the “punishment clause” of the 13th Amendement while supporting mandatory community service as a condition for high school graduation and mandatory universal national service.

There would seem to be an obvious element of hypocrisy here. But, on closer examination, perhaps not. Perhaps opponents of the punishment clause don’t like the fact that the forced labor appears to be mainly targeted against African-Americans. Since its creation in 1828, the Democratic Party has supported involuntary servitude. In the decades leading up to the Civil War, the Democrats defended Southern slavery against the Abolitionists. Furthermore, being democrats, they supported the right of majorities to impose slavery by popular vote. Afterward, they supported Jim Crow and lynching. In the 20th Century, the Democrats led the effort to legally segregate America. After that, the Democrats turned their attention to the systematic design to enslave America through step-by-step socialism, beginning with the welfare state and culminating in Democratic Socialism.

So maybe there’s no contradiction in eliminating the punishment clause while supporting mandatory community service for school children and mandatory universal national service for 18 year-olds. It seems that the Democrats can support slavery as long as it is not racially discriminatory.

Tuesday, November 19, 2019

The Growing Threat of Mandatory National Slavery . . . Excuse Me, ‘Service’

Linda Stamato, the collectivist Rutgers University professor, joined the rising call for universal mandatory service. No surprise there. In a New Jersey Star-Ledger guest column Should all Americans be required to serve?, Stamato declared that a universal draft would “unify” the country. Mandatory public service would be a win-win for those who receive and those who give, she asserts. Stamato lists a whole bunch of anecdotal examples of people voluntarily serving in programs like the Peace Corps and Vista, saying they represent “the best of America”. Despite these programs, which have helped millions here and abroad, it is “not good enough.” Why she has the right to make this judgement she doesn’t say. But her motive is clear. On her way to endorsing “that the nation step up and mandate . . . universal service” she writes:

There appears to be no widely held expectation of service in the U.S., however, and no culture to nurture it.

Institutionalizing public service as a national responsibility is a productive way to think about this. It’s less about charity and more about a kind of reciprocity, providing a means for young people in particular to find paths to “earn” their citizenship, perhaps to cultivate future vocations, but certainly to see service as a way to help improve the lives of others and, by doing so, add value to their own.

And we should create a culture of service by providing encouragement for service in K-12 schools and provide frameworks to support service in the years following secondary and postsecondary school.

Incredibly, though not surprisingly given the Star-Ledger’s heavy Leftist leaning, this article was published under the label "Humanitarianism"! I posted these comments:

Tyrants of every type have fed off of the belief that the individual’s life is not his, but belongs to the collective—the tribe, society, the nation, the public. The Enlightenment swept that away under the ideal of individualism, and codified it in the Declaration of Independence, which recognizes each person’s inalienable right to his own life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.

A “culture” of forced service is not a humane culture. It is a resurrection of the master/slave orientation. Genuine reciprocity is built on voluntary trade, in which one person serves another in exchange for payment. Voluntary charitable service is a fine supplement. But it is only moral when it is voluntary and consistent with the server’s interests, goals, and values. It is not moral if it is some master imposing her idea of “meaning” on others. “Encouraging”—indoctrinating—schoolchildren into a “culture of service” to “the nation” is not education. It is setting the foundation for authoritarianism. It is educational malpractice. It serves power-hungry politicians and their ivory tower rationalizers at the expense of kids.

The military draft was barbaric. Mandatory universal public service is orders of magnitude worse. It is thoroughly immoral. The “unity” of universal mandatory service is the unity of chains. Any slave plantation or totalitarian state can boast of that type of unity. Humane unity is based on shared values rooted in respect for the rights of others, including the right of those who disagree to go about their lives unmolested. It’s bad enough to steal a year or two of a person’s life. But once you establish the collectivist principle that the “nation” owns the individual, the door is wide open to ever-expanding servitude and shrinking freedom.

National service is not a new idea, of course. It has been around for a long time, and breaks into public attention from time to time. This is such a time. Given the rise of socialist politicians, it’s not surprising.

But this time there may be a serious threat of it happening. Schools have been laying the foundation for some form of national servitude for a while, with requirements for “community service” attached to high school graduation. But I did not know that there is a National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service. Stamato claims it is a bipartisan congressional panel, and will be releasing its report soon. Many Democratic presidential candidates have endorsed it.

Scary developments. It’s also another example of the fact that fundamentally, the only way to fight back against collectivism requires fighting back against altruism. It’s a tough fight. But altruism, properly understood as defining moral behavior as self-sacrificially serving others, is what gives advocates of involuntary servitude the moral cover they need to justify it. It gives collectivists the moral high ground. The Founding Fathers gave us a political revolution on behalf of the common person’s right to live for his own sake. The rising tide of support for “national service” to “earn” one’s citizenship is about as clear an indication as you can get that if Americanism is to be saved, a moral revolution on behalf of the common person’s right to life and liberty is the only path forward.