The opener from my column on Obama’s — and just about everyone else’s — national service love affair:

There’s a weird irony at work when Sen. Barack Obama, the black presidential candidate who will allegedly scrub the stain of racism from the nation, vows to run afoul of the constitutional amendment that abolished slavery. For those who don’t remember, the 13th Amendment says: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime . . . shall exist within the United States.” In Obama’s mind it must be a crime to be born or to attend college.

Doc Bainbridge takes exception, it seems, to what he considers a too broad indictment of Obama’s proposals for tying service to college aid. He asks: “If you’re a poor kid who can’t afford to go to college on your own and you want the Army to pay your way through college, you have to join ROTC and commit to serve when you graduate. Is that servitude in Jonah’s book?”

My answer, in brief, is No. First, as I indicate at the end of the column, my core objection to the college-aid type stuff is the way it would change — or continue to change — the culture. John Walters put it well in his criticism of Americorps over a decade ago:

But its very premise — using federal resources to promote voluntarism — contradicts the principle of self-government that lies at the heart of citizenship. AmeriCorps blurs the line between the problems and needs best addressed by individuals, voluntary association and localities and those best addressed by the federal government. Instead, it seems to suggest that social problems are the responsibility of the central government, and the federal bureaucracy must direct and improve local solutions.

Second, I should have said that I consider military service to be different. There are no moral equivalents of war, so treating roadside clean-up or some other state-approved make-work as if they were the same thing is foolish. (I’m not an absolutist on this, the Peace Corps seems like a worthwhile program).

By the way, my thinking on the draft has changed over the years. I basically agree with Bainbridge, Milton Friedman and others that the draft is morally very problematic and difficult to differentiate from involuntary servitude or slavery. But I don’t think that means it’s never a legitimate option of the state. The Constitution isn’t a suicide pact and all that. If the country truly needs a draft for a war like WWII, I think a draft would be a necessary evil — one that actually has a lot of positive side effects, by the way. What bothers me about national service fetishists is they look at the positive side benefits — enforced egalitarianism etc — and say they want to take a necessary evil and turn it into an unnecessary evil.

Also I think Bainbridge’s close reading of Obama’s remarks misses both the thrust of Obama’s argument as well as the spirit of the times (recall Michelle Obama’s promise that her husband would require us to work?). Obama’s national service rhetoric — never mind the mainstream support for compulsory national service — suggest to me that his speech amounted to the opening of the bidding for ever more ambitious national service schemes, whoever wins the White House.

Jim Geraghty’s got more on the subject. But I think this reader cuts to the core of the issue nicely:

This is really about supplying a stock of unpaid peons for various “noble non-profit causes”. We’ve gone from “rock the vote” to “frogmarch the vote”. How special.