National service would be slavery. Stop calling for it.

In honour of Simcoe Day* and with the first legal limits on slavery in Canada in mind, I’m in The Hub today (w/ husband) pushing back against a dangerous idea that never seems to want to die: forced labour.

On Twitter, this is being billed as a conversation within the conservative movement. I’m not a conservative, and that this could be a conversation within their movement is enough to explain why. (If they were to ask for advice about where to start that conversation I’d suggest that those in favour should be able to articulate whether/why they disagree that forced labour is slavery or just slavery they believe is worth it.)

But if conservatives are having this conversation, they’re not the only ones. Andrew Yang also floated the idea over the weekend and his Twitter poll eked out conditional support for forced labour among his followers.

Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi have pointed out that it’s when ideas of individual liberty and dignity and pushback against state overreach are marginalized that libertarians have the most value to add as an independent political force.

This sort of stuff should be our baseline—level-one libertarian commitments. It’s the sort of thing we shouldn’t let slide even when the arguments feel so basic as to be boring. Libertarians are engaged in rearguard action on a lot of fronts these days. That means going back to basics—like calling forced labour what it is, and demanding those who call for it acknowledge what they’re doing.

Working on a few things, so more soon. In the meantime, if you want more to read I recommend Agitated Clusters of Comforting Rage from Justin Ling’s Bug-eyed and Shameless. I wasn’t familiar with the idea of homophily, the problems with its origin, or how it played into algorithmic traffic on Facebook.

*Technically it was Colonel By Day here in Ottawa, but John Graves Simcoe deserves it more.