Is National Service Temporary Kidnapping?

Joe Sobran reminds us on what national service is really about:

What we are talking about here, of course, is slavery, more delicately called “involuntary servitude” — not giving something back, but taking something that isn’t yours. Military conscription, or the draft, falls under the same heading, a violation of the unalienable right to life and liberty.

American courts have always exempted the draft from the Thirteenth Amendment prohibition against slavery. The courts do the same for taxes. If the government owns you and your labor, including your property, the thinking seems to run, it isn’t really slavery.

But the essence of slavery doesn’t lie in who owns you; it lies in the mere fact of your being owned at all. The key term is involuntary. Private chattel slavery has been replaced by state slavery, disguised by the genial rhetoric of democracy. Slavery becomes giving something back, everyone doing his part, and so on. One writer speaks loftily of “an ethic of common provision.”

All such talk obscures the essential element of force — organized state coercion under the forms of law.

As you can imagine Joe Sobran isn't up for tenure at an Ivy League school.