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Hi. No, not a "draft", if by draft you mean a random conscription for a specific conflict, like with Vietnam.
Slavery?!
I'm referring to a program of national service (probably military, but possibly other forms too) mandatory for all citizens within a period of time shortly after becoming a legal adult. Countries like South Korea, Norway, Singapore come to mind as examples, but of course there are many others.
Personally, I think a form of national service is a potential generational solution to the extreme political polarization among the United States citizenry. So, that's the spirit of what I mean when I say national service here.
@Ledger By “slavery” I meant the use of people to perform forced labor for the federal government under the carve outs of the 13th amendment.
And by “the draft” I meant anything. That would be called “the draft” by people discussing the issue, both random compulsory service and universal compulsory service and compulsory service with limited exceptions, but not a head tax or similar thing that only hard libertarians would characterize as forced service.
Oh oh, so you mean would something like penal labor imposed on convicted criminals in the context of seeking to abolish it count as a YES for this question?
No, that's not what I'm referring to here. I'm referring to a form of national service common for all citizens (e.g. Norway or South Korea). Strictly speaking it wouldn't have to be mandatory - one could opt out by giving up their citizenship, but I digress.
@MattLashofSullivan Hi Matt. Nice to meet you. Since this is a recreational site with no real money at stake, I might be a little cavalier with my questions from time to time.
That said, an example of what I would consider serious might be the prompting of a stance on this question among candidates in a presidential debate; or at least one serious candidate (e.g. invited to a major presidential debate) making this issue a central part of their platform. Would you consider UBI to have been a serious topic in the 2020 election because of Andrew Yang? I would. So, something like that.
Yes, there is an element of judgement 🤷. Could I invest more time to come up with a more quantifiable metric? Probably. But see above about this being a recreational site. I've got kids and yard work and stuff like that to do too 🙂.
I'm open to suggestions, if you have any.
@Ledger nah this is good. I feel like a succinct way to have expressed this is just including one sentence in the description like "at least on the level of UBI/Andrew Yang in 2020"