There's a Word for It

by Paul Jacob, Contributing Author: The word is “effrontery.”

With shameless boldness, two gentlemen testifying for mandatory “National Service” at a recent hearing of the National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service pitched the notion that social dysfunction and directionlessness among the young could be best solved by forcing them to work for government for a year.

I indicated the effrontery — the maximum chutzpah — in a video last weekend. But it is more than “just” the case that forcing labor on people in a free society is a whopping internal contradiction — we can only be free if we are unfree, and we should push servitude for freedom’s sake? It is also astoundingly presumptuous.

Consider the context.

The rap about the young is that they inhabit a gimme-gimme culture, always taking, never giving back. But when was the last time the two parties in Congress took a stand on a difficult issue that required doing something inconvenient, like saying no to their own constituencies? When did they decide not to spend to please their various political interests because going further into debt was perilous for the entire nation?

Spending other people’s money is easy, the ultimate “gimme.”

Meanwhile, Congress bogs down in pointless partisan “investigations,” idiotic virtue signaling, and defense of their own wayward members.

It is absurd to suggest that experts in Washington, D.C., could “fix” a generation of young people, since official Washington is far more dysfunctional than the citizens they think they can remold in their craven image.

Effrontery, indeed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Paul Jacob (@Common_Sense_PJ ) is author of Common Sense which provides daily commentary about the issues impacting America and about the citizens who are doing something about them. He is also President of the Liberty Initiative Fund (LIFe) as well as Citizens in Charge Foundation. Jacob is a contributing author on the ARRA News Service.

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