Draft the old?

Uncle Sam Wants You, Gramps - How come "national service" proponents never talk about drafting the old?

Excerpt:

One of the most interesting (and in my view sinister) aspects of proposals for mandatory "national service" is that they virtually always target only the young, usually 18- to 21-year-olds. This might be understandable if the proposals were limited to military service. But most current proposals (including those by Rep. Charles Rangel, Sen. John McCain, Bill Buckley, the Democratic Leadership Conference and Rep. Rahm Emanuel), incorporate civilian service as well. When it comes to office work and light menial labor, there are many elderly and middle-aged people who can do the job just as well as 18-21 year olds can, if not better.

Indeed, the moral case for conscripting the elderly for civilian service is arguably stronger than that for drafting the young. Many elderly people are healthy enough to perform nonstrenuous forms of "national service." Unlike the young, the elderly usually won't have to postpone careers, marriage and educational opportunities to fulfill their forced-labor obligations. Moreover, the elderly, to a far greater extent than the young, are beneficiaries of massive government redistributive programs, such as Social Security and Medicare--programs that transfer enormous amounts of wealth from other age groups to themselves. Nonelderly poor people who receive welfare benefits are required to work (or at least be looking for work) under the 1996 welfare reform law; it stands to reason that the elderly (most of whom are far from poor) can be required to work for the vastly larger government benefits that they receive.

Middle-aged people are also not obviously inferior candidates for civilian "national service" than the young. I know I could do most kinds of service better today than when I was 18. To be clear, I am not arguing for imposing forced labor on the elderly or the middle-aged; but I do believe that doing so would be no worse than imposing that burden on the young.


Comment: If the Marines would take a 58 year old guy who walked with crutches, I would go! I could serve in some IT function! But the purpose of the article is to highlight the inconsistencies in the idea of a national draft for "national service"!