To Destroy ISIS, Conscript Millennials, Says Baby Boomer Journalist

I am a millennial, get me out of here!

Robby Soave|Jun. 17, 2015 10:40 am

National Journal’s Ron Fournier has come up with a frightening, ageist approach to defeating ISIS: enslave the millennials! He explains:

I know a better way to fight ISIS. It starts with an idea that should appeal the better angels of both hawks and doves: National service for all 18- to 28-years-olds.

Require virtually every young American—the civic-minded millennial generation—to complete a year of service through programs such as Teach for America, AmeriCorps, the Peace Corps, or the U.S. military, and two things will happen:

1. Virtually every American family will become intimately invested in the nation’s biggest challenges, including poverty, education, income inequality, and America’s place in a world afire.

2. Military recruiting will rise to meet threats posed by ISIS and other terrorist networks, giving more people skin in a very dangerous game.

The tone of Fournier’s column suggests that he considers mandatory national service a compromise in light of political realism—he would clearly prefer to restore the draft outright. This “compromise” idea is less horrifying than the draft, but not by a whole lot.

Disclaimer: I’m a millennial. I’m 26-years-old. I’m married and have a surprisingly steady job writing about why the government sucks. I’m supposed to just set all that aside for a year to work for causes I either don’t support, or actively oppose?

There are so many things wrong with this idea. For starters, it violates the principles upon which this nation was founded—that all men and women have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. While the Supreme Court has never held that mandatory national service violates the Constitution, the language of the Thirteen Amendment seems pretty clear to me: “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.”

At the root of Fournier’s plan is a more insidiously evil notion: that millennials aren’t doing anything worthwhile with their lives right now, and their time would be better spent in Teach for America, or the Army. There’s some anti-market thinking at work here, since typically, the activities that free people choose for themselves are more productive and profitable than the ones totalitarian governments assign to them. This is why the comparatively less meddlesome U.S. government is generally in better shape than, say, Venezuela. Fournier is essentially saying that in order to defeat our enemies, we have to mimic their levels of disrespect for individual freedom.

https://reason.com/blog/2015/06/17/to-destroy-isis-conscript-millennials-sa