Healthcare: ❎ “No, that’s communism!”
Mandatory Labor: ✅ “Yes, that’s patriotism!”
🙄
Spin universal healthcare as “Those damn overpayed doctors should be forced to support their nation!” and BOOM, patriotism.
It could start a… Cultural revolution… One could say
Every American has to do one season of farm work but all food is now free. Monkey’s paw curls and all that.
Farmers can’t just have free labor and still get all the profits.
I remember hearing that there was a similar concept in Soviet Union at some point, when normal citizens worked collecting fruits or something like that.
We could call it “The Large Jump Ahead” or something.
I mean a national labor corps with incentivized participation isn’t the worst idea. Gives people the opportunity to get work experience without necessarily having to understand their career direction in life.
Shouldn’t be a draft in any circumstances but absolute crisis situation, like essential infrastructure is on the brink of total collapse and regular pay incentives aren’t getting bodies on it fast enough.
Who knows, might get some people into work they didn’t realize they’d gel with, plenty of inspector positions are behind work load and I’ve got s feeling a part of that is just people not knowing the work is out there.
I’d be super on board for this. Treat it similarly to the military, where room and board are provided, and they ship you to an underserved part of the country to help.
Especially if we extended the GI Bill to cover participating. Like, do 4 yrs and you get full tuition covered at any public university.
I think it would really promote national unity and help to lift people out of poverty. You’d have people from all over the country working together, bridging a lot of our internal divisions. You’d get people out of their bubbles and echo chambers and have them actually seeing the country.
If we could normalize it, where it’s just what people did after highschool, it would give people time to figure their lives out. Remove the pressure of having to choose a career right away. I know so many people who “had to go to college” because that was the next step, but didn’t have a clue what they wanted in life, so got useless majors and have dead ended. This would be perfect for people like that.
Plus infrastructure in the US is a joke. And even as the OP implies, farming is a broken business in the US for a number of reasons. There are never enough people working soup kitchens and food pantries, or cleaning up our national forests to prevent forest fires. If we could mobilize our young people en masse, we could make a huge difference in this country.
I’m 1000% on board.
Yeah that’s all fine but it’s blocked by one of two major political parties in the US doesn’t believe government should exist. At best they’d support a privatized version of the that siphoned money out and didn’t help people that need help.
We’re going to struggle to get anything done as long as conservatives are treated as if they have any merit.
No, I think that’s actually the beauty of this. The OP meme is a right wing meme. A national civil service is a right wing position.
I think there’s a way to craft this program in a hugely bipartisan way. You get all the “patriotism, one nation, farms and country” stuff the right wants, and all the “infrastructure improvements, social safety nets, free college” stuff the left wants.
I think there’s a real potential to get some solid bipartisanism here.
So there was a reduction of family-operators farming between 1950 and 1990; by 74%. Of course, the number of hired workers has risen. On the surface that makes sense. I would imagine that farms hire illegal immigrants so that they can pay them less than the minimum visa-required pay (which is slightly more than minimum wage); probably also do not provide much in the way of benefits or vacation either. That’s my hunch.
But if i were a young man, and i went through college, and was struggling finding a career in my field and facing the student debt i no-doubt accrued during college, i sure as shit wouldn’t want to spend any amount of time doing indentured servitude. If i did, I’d voluntarily join the Peace Corps or something.
This is insane.
Would you feel differently if people who choose to serve have student debt forgiveness? Like, if the GI Bill covered participants?
I have no issue with people choosing to do anything, regardless of the incentives. What i do have a problem with is the idea of mandatory service that people have no good choice over.
Fair. I get that. I do think it could be something great, but agree it would be better structured as voluntary with heavy incentives for participating.
That said, to your original point, I doubt the intent was to have mandatory service for recent college graduates. Most systems like this require service immediately after high school. So you wouldn’t have a bunch of debt or anything at that point.
Will they get to keep the produce? Otherwise, this is just slavery and very much in line with conservative ideology again.
Where does it say you don’t get paid?
Also, in terms of understanding how things happen, this is definitely not a bad thing.
So many people take everything for granted. I worked a couple of years in agriculture. Long days, tough work. I will never look down on a farmer, and it thought me some neat lessons in life too.
I worked on a farm from 23-30 and my body is kinda destroyed now. Had surgery on my wrist, my back hurts all the time. I’m getting arthritis in my fingers and knees. All at the ripe age of 36.
It’s definitely valuable work, but there’s a reason old farmers tend to walk like Arthur Morgan.
Call me naive, but it seems to me that if everyone was pitching in for a season of farm work, less people overall would be doing 8/15/etc consecutive years and getting their bodies destroyed.
It depends on the farm. It’s not completely unskilled labor, especially if you’re dealing with livestock or large machinery like what’s used for harvesting/spreading manure/tilling.
Implementing something like what’s being suggested would require some sort if funding from the government to train people to get ready to do it, and honestly a lot of farmers aren’t going to want a bunch of green farmhands all at the same time. In a lot of cases it’d be more trouble than it’s worth.
Asking someone who has never been on a farm to just jump in on an operation and be helpful is kinda setting everyone up to fail. There’s more to a farm than picking crops and cleaning up animal poop.
I mean, something simple like fixing a fence can be a pain in the ass if you dont know what youre doing. Plus, theres a lot of ways to get hurt or killed if you’re not familiar with the environment.
