National Service = Involuntary Servitude

by Williamson M. Evers

This article by a long-time Libertarian scholar was published in the New York Times, April 15, 1989

INDENTURED SERVITUDE by Williamson M. Evers, Stanford, Calif.

Over the past year, Senator Sam Nunn, Democrat of Georgia, has been promoting a plan for national service. Senator Nunn's plan would wipe out all existing Federal aid for most college students and instead make any such aid conditional on one or two years of service to the state. On Jan. 25, George Mitchell, the Senate majority leader, gave Senator Nunn's plan his personal blessing and included it in the legislative priorities of Senate Democrats for the 101st Congress.

Some of those advancing such plans see them as beachheads that, once secured, can be expanded into a universal compulsory labor program for young people. For example, Roger Landrum, co-director of Youth Service of America, publicly supports the Nunn plan and calls for expanding it to make national service a mandantory requirement for all high school students, male and female.

What is the essence of this new plan? Stripped of rhetorical flourishes, the core is debt servitude. Its enactment would revive the concept of indentured servitude, a form of bondage common in colonial America. Hundreds of thousands of young people would become 20th century indentured students.

In colonial America, indentured servants worked in bondage and obeyed their master's orders for a set number of years. In return, the master paid for trans-Atlantic passage, provided his servants with food, clothing and shelter, and often paid his servants a lump sum ("freedom dues") when the period of service ended. Some colonists even indentured themselves to obtain funds to pay for medical care, schooling or training for a new job.

The coercion that backed up indentured servitude was brutal and demeaning.

Colonial laws punished runaway indentured servants with severity. Maryland's laws were particularly harsh. The government initially sought to punish runaways with death, but later reduced the penalty to an extension of service 10 times the period of the servant's unauthorized absence.

All the colonies enacted pass laws, rather like those on the books in South Africa until recently, to hinder the movements of runaway servants. Colonial governments prohibited enticing, alluring or inveigling indentured servants to marry of leave work. Indentured servants who became pregnant were penalized with extra years of service.

The details of Senator Nunn's national service plan are different from the system of labor servitude in colonial America -- but the principle is the same.

In National Service America, if Congress enacts the Nunn plan, young people would obey public officials for a set number of years under the administrative discipline of the Federal National Service Corps. In return, the Government would provide the indentured students with their subsistence during the period of service and would grant them an education or housing voucher when it ended.

A distinctive feature of the Nunn plan is the repeal of much of the current $8 billion program of Government grants and loans to 3.9 million undergraduates. Instead, the Government would provide college loans and vouchers for college only to the 800,000 people who have completed a term of national service or received hardship exemptions.

The Nunn plan would cut off aid to millions of students currently receiving it. Such a cut-off is not a bad policy in itself but it is bad policy when made part of an effort to establish national service and do so in a way that would fill its ranks with hordes of discontented students.

Whatever the flaws with the existing system of student aid, we do not need to replace it with a program that could evolve into a universal compulsory labor requirement for youth.

Williamson M. Evers is a fellow at the Hoover Institution