Democrat Senate candidate from Texas Beto O’Rourke hoped to “introduce a bill to Congress this year that would require all young people to spend at least a year ‘in service to this country.'” This is a form of servitude. There is no provision in the Constitution for required service to this country. It’s bad enough that young people are propagandized by our government in government schools 6 hours each day for 192 days each year for 12 years, now this Democrat wants more of their time from brainwashing.

What political party do you think will benefit from such a law? Democrats. Democrats are all about other people serving the State. The State is their provider. All good things come from Washington with other people’s money.

For liberals, the State takes on divine attributes. Anything the State decides to do is right and good because a god can’t be wrong or challenged. Conde Pallen’s utopian novel Crucible Island depicts what happens when the true God is rejected. Man looks for a substitute provider so that “the individual should have no thought, desire, or object other than the public welfare, of which the State is the creator and the inviolable guardian. As soon as the child is capable of learning, he is taught the Socialist Catechism, whose first questions run as follows”:

Q. By whom were you begotten?
A. By the sovereign State.
Q. Why were you begotten?
A. That I might know, love, and serve the Sovereign State always.
Q. What is the sovereign State?
A. The sovereign State is humanity in composite and perfect being.
Q. Why is the State supreme?
A. The State is supreme because it is my Creator and Conserver in which I am and move and have my being and without which I am nothing.
Q. What is the individual?
A. The individual is only a part of the whole, and made for the whole, and finds his complete and perfect expression in the sovereign State. Individuals are made for cooperation only, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth.1

We already are in service (servitude) to this country. The fruit of our labor is confiscated so they State can redistribute it to people who have no right to it, either morally (“You shall not steal”) or constitutionally. Statists justify their policies because they maintain its the role of the State to act as a parent to the people.

The paternal state not only feeds its children, but nurtures, educates, comforts, and disciplines them, providing all they need for their security. This appears to be a mildly insulting way to treat adults, but it is really a great crime because it transforms the state from being a gift of God, given to protect us against violence, into an idol. It supplies us with all blessings, and we look to it for all our needs. Once we sink to that level, as [C.S.] Lewis says, there is no point in telling state officials to mind their own business. “Our whole lives are their business” [God in the Dock, p. 134]. The paternalism of the state is that of the bad parent who wants his children dependent on him forever. That is an evil impulse. The good parent prepares his children for independence, trains them to make responsible decisions, knows that he harms them by not helping them to break loose. The paternal state thrives on dependency. When the dependents free themselves, it loses power. It is, therefore, parasitic on the very persons whom it turns into parasites. Thus, the state and its dependents march symbiotically to destruction.

When the provision of paternal security replaces the provision of justice as the function of the state, the state stops providing justice. The ersatz [artificial and inferior substitute] parent ceases executing judgment against those who violate the law, and the nation begins losing benefits of justice. Those who are concerned about the chaos into which the criminal justice system has fallen should consider what the state’s function has become.  Because the state can only be a bad imitation of a father, as a dancing bear act is of a ballerina, the protection of this Leviathan of a father turns out to be a bear hug.” (Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction, 183‑184.))

Mandatory service to the State is just one more way to get young people to believe that the State is the true savior. All it needs to fully implement its agenda is their votes and other people’s money.

If you want to see the results of Statist Paternalism, talk to Native Americans about life on the reservation.

1. Condé Benoist Pallen, Crucible Island: A Romance, an Adventure and an Experiment (New York: The Manhattanville Press, 1919), 109-110. [↩]