"Giving Back": Involuntary Servitude for the Young

John Kerry keeps talking about young people "giving something back." Exactly what did young people take away and from whom did they take it? What is the factual basis for such an accusation? And why is it so general, applied to the whole population of young people?

These are the questions that John Kerry—and indeed, most politicians, including many Republicans—don't ever want you to ask. But ask them you should. If one segment of the population can be accused, without evidence or reason, of owing something to a politician, then any or all segments of the population can be subject to the implications of the same moral edict.

The context in which John Kerry advances this idea, at the moment, is college tuition. He asserts that because the government is kind enough to provide grants and reduced loans to young people, students should have to pay for them in the form of "national service"—itself a vaguely defined term, usually meant to imply anything not in one's own interest.

This reasoning, however, is dishonest.

It represents a half-truth—or a third-truth. It is true that many young people benefit from government help for college. However, loans are loans and still must be paid back. As for government grants, this kind of help is not "provided" by anybody except the taxpayers forced to make these donations to the college education of young people they don't know.

If John Kerry wants something to be given back, he should give this money, taken coercively, back to the people who didn't choose to make these "donations" in the first place. Eliminating government grants for education would not only be morally fair to those forced to pay for those grants against their will; it would also drive down the cost of tuition, since colleges would have to work harder to convince parents that their high tuition rates were worth it, in the absence of government help. The same applies to government subsidies towards student loans.

Even more important than anything I'm saying about college tuition is this: the principle of "giving back" through coerced "national service" is in utter opposition to the foundations of a free society. At its core, this principle implies that a human being owes a debt to society (meaning, in practice, to the government)—merely for being alive and being born.

This is the bedrock principle of totalitarianism.

No, John Kerry is not interested in carrying this principle that far. But on what basis is he justified in carrying this principle forward at all? And why on earth does nobody challenge a politician when he says something like this? John Kerry is saying that merely because the government provides a few subsidies for educational loans, young people can be subject to months or years of involuntary government servitude. This should be the talk of the talk shows and the editorial pages!

Even a little bit of a bad principle is a bad thing. Once the bad principle is established—or goes unchallenged—the way is cleared for more and more implementations of the bad principle as time goes by. This is why the founders of the United States of America commented that we had been given a republic if we can keep it. Each time a statement like John Kerry's goes unchallenged, we lose a little bit more of our republic and our freedom.

Dr. Michael Hurd is a psychotherapist, life coach and author of Effective Therapy (New York: Dunhill, 1997) and Grow Up America! Visit his website at: www.DrHurd.com.