Anton P. Nym post=18.68581.634421 said:
Rutawitz said:
how come this hasnt been all over the news?
Probably because the source for that blog entry is "World Net Daily", which is about as reliable as the Weekly World News. This looks to be just another Swift-boating to me, folks; it's from the same people saying that Obama is a Muslim terrorist plant and eats babies for breakfast.
If some
reputable source (ie: not a propaganda engine that even the Republican Party is embarrased to have) comes up with some sort of quote about Obama looking at a program of national service,
that's the time to start pondering.
-- Steve
Steve, please look at the site - it actually has the full video of the speech. Unless you believe that the American Thinker has the resources to create a fake full-motion, full sound video of Obama AND that Obama has for some reason not questioned it, this IS exactly what he said.
That said, compulsory service has been a part of the Democrat agenda for some time. The idea that Obama intends to raise a federal police force as large as our armed forces - which would enshrine the Democrat party in exactly the same way as Putin's party in Russia - is immensely terrifying because he's almost certainly going to be our next president. But I don't think that's what he intends.
Instead, the "national civilian army" will be a million plus people drafted to serve as teachers, nurses, day care workers, street cleaners, school janitors, painters, and whatever else the federal government desires they do. This is the new feudalism that began with the imposition of the income tax as opposed to excise or sales tax - the idea that the government decides its share and takes it off the top, THEN you get what it is left.
In the new feudalism, the government will take some portion of your time and labor - a portion IT decides, by the way - and use that time and labor as it wishes. Historically both free and non-free owed special services - such as free or paid labor at harvest or in time of war - but the non-free also owed regular service for one or more days each week, days which the lord used as he wished for his own benefit without payment. We are now being drawn back into that model, where the government claims a portion of each high school student's time, a larger portion of each college student's time, and then all the new graduate's time for a specified period. The first two services will be without payment, with the servant's parents responsible for his upkeep, but the third will come with a modest payment to enable the servant to support himself during his service. Other serf duties such as heriot (where the lord takes the deceased's best weapons and armor, his best animal, or his best suit of clothing if he has no weapons or animals, later reduced to a monetary payment now known as the estate tax) and merchet (the fee paid to the lord by an unfree man to be allowed to marry off his daughter, now called a marriage license fee) have already been restored. Interestingly, one strong measure of whether a man was free or unfree was whether his father and grandfather had paid heriot upon death, and whether he had paid merchet for his daughter to be allowed to marry.
Whether you think this is a good thing or a bad thing depends on your preferred balance between freedom and services. The more wealth and labor the government takes from you, the more services it can provide to you and others.