TheHeretic
Posts: 19100
Joined: 3/25/2007
From: California, USA
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The promised reply to AnimusRex:
Yes. We are going to need highly competent, highly skilled people in a lot of positions across all levels of government. There are positions where a young person meeting their national service obligation just isn't going to be a viable option. Your example of engineering inspectors is an excellent one. We all drive across those bridges, any of us could be in the store or restaraunt, or nightclub when a fire breaks out. Personally, I would prefer the bridge not collapse and that the sprinklers work if needed. Should this be a lifetime career though? Couldn't we achieve the same result by hiring our inspectors on, say, a 4 year contract and perhaps paying them a bit more, but without the long term obligations? Wouldn't the same work for our accountants and attorneys? Why does this need to be a lifetime career?
We also run into the issue of people who forget, after a decade or so, just who they work for, and why. They get sedate, and lazy, and resistant to any notion of change. Consider the example, so generously offered in this thread, of the public servant who believes they have it all figured out, and that it is hopeless anyway, so why bother to do anything but become useless, clockpunching deadwood, their ass macramed into the chair, lashing out blindly at anyone who threatens their comfortable status quo of institutionalized mediocrity. Surely, Rex, you have sent plans in, and said "fuck" when you heard which inspector would be reviewing them?
Sticking with your example of the department of building and safety, why exactly does the person who stamps the plans "received" at the counter need to be a highly skilled career employee? Or the one who takes the concrete core sample out of the slab and over to the lab? Or the clerk who calculates how much the permits are going to cost? Wouldn't the national service employee be able to do this just as well?
Now there are public sector jobs where we do want a lifetime of experience, and those jobs should offer the kind of pay and benefits that are going to attract and retain quality people. Police detectives, mid and upper level firefighters are the sorts of things that spring to mind, but I'm sure there are many more.
So. How do we make this mandatory service thing work? It's a helluva lot bigger than just filling full-time government jobs.
First off, we are talking about a lot of young people. The number I came up with for 18-23 year olds in the US for 2010 was 26 million (ish. This is an outline, not a research paper). Let's make it easy and say we are talking about half of those serving at any given time, and we wind up with roughly 13 million young people. Where do we even put all of them? The answer is, everywhere. Service is going to be mandatory, but the form of that service is going have many options.
During the Bush II years, it was quite a popular talking point that our military was stretched too thin, and that repeated deployments were creating all sorts of problems for our National Guard forces. Let's seriously increase our numbers of available full-time and weekend military personnel. This actually costs us money, but I don't see peace breaking out all over.
I'd also suggest we create something like the Guard, but without the military component. Call it a "community response force" that can be called out for everything from crowd control at a Michael Jackson funeral to crews of strong young backs to fill and lay sandbags when the river starts rising. They train and drill, but then they go home to their lives. They don't even have to get a particular haircut. Right now, we have some of the best trained and equipped warriors on the planet, the Marines and 82nd Airborne, handing out water and MRE's in Haiti. Is that an effective use of manpower? Except for a per diem sort of rate when in training, these folks aren't on the payroll (just to state what should be obvious, we'll equip them and cover them if they get hurt, of course).
Given the vast pool of candidates for these programs, we can set the qualifications bar pretty high.
We'll accept service done through non-governmental organizations as well, and that won't cost us squat except some recordkeeping. There are lots of possibilities there.
Then we'll have the full-time options. A much expanded and modified Job Corps is going to be one of those. This is where we get our new force of low-level public servants. We'll tier the program, according to education. I'm inclined to set the lowest tier of this as pretty much the only option for our high-school dropouts. They'll at least enter adult society with some clue about what it is to put in a day's work. They can mow lawns in our parks, patch potholes, and yes, clean those nasty litterboxes at the animal shelter. We are going to have some clean motherfucking freeways! They'll also be offered educational opportunities, now that they have had a taste of the job market open to them. Above that level, we'll get clerical workers, delivery drivers for people and goods (I haven't had any postal workers come at me yet, gotta piss them off too  ), jail and prison guards, all the way up to college graduates who used deferrments, now using their education to do some public good. I'm not a fan of centralized control, so a lot of this is going to be administered on a more state/regional level, and once they have completed the training, the agency they wind up assigned to is going to be picking up the whole tab.
It's neither a perfect, nor complete plan, but that should give you a much clearer idea of what I'm thinking would work.
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If you lose one sense, your other senses are enhanced.
That's why people with no sense of humor have such an inflated sense of self-importance.
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RE: How Public Servants Became our Masters - 
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