I’m not entirely sure if John McCain and Barack Obama are trying to gain or lose the votes of college students when they advocate, in various terms, the notion of “national service.”

In preaching what amounts to civil conscription, they imagine that people forced into this program will form a glorious Borg cube, acting with lock-step efficiency in serving the public good. Even worse, their rhetoric often devolves into an ungrateful attack on the private sector, revealing a disturbing belief that only government service is noble, whereas entering the private sector is dishonorably selfish.

McCain even had the nerve to attack Mitt Romney for working in the private sector, saying that when Romney was in charge, “sometimes people lost their jobs.”

Maybe he doesn’t realize that companies sometimes have good reasons for laying off or firing people. Or perhaps McCain, despite his work against pork, has no clue how bloated the government payroll is because he’s never spent time at an institution that really cares about wasteful spending on employees.

Obama’s rhetoric is just as sanctimoniously arrogant as McCain’s, if not more so. He revels in bashing people who, in his words, “chase only after the big house and the nice suits and all the other things that our money culture says you should buy.”

Perhaps he’s forgetting that the Declaration of Independence refers to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” rather than “life, liberty and the selfless pursuit of the collective good through big government.”

Those of us who plan to work in the private sector after graduation should note Obama’s astounding lack of respect for our personal goals.

Political candidates who pin anyone animated by the profit motive as greedy narcissists falsely imagine the government and its employees as the nation’s glorious mule, dragging private sector’s parasites who contribute nothing to the greater good.

It is precisely this antiquated, paternalistic notion that Adam Smith shredded with the concept of the invisible hand. No amount of academic revisionism can eliminate its central premise: that the private sector, comprising of individuals trying to better their lot in life, is the engine that powers the nation.

Yes, government employees, from the postal worker to the fighter pilot to the FBI agent, have key roles to play.

But public service, like all occupations, is for those who choose it of their own free will.

These concepts underlie the all-volunteer military, which fights better and takes far fewer casualties than any conscripted force would, in part because the military is self-selecting; only those with aptitude volunteer.

Regardless of the circumstances, politicians have no right to send the nation’s future artists, stockbrokers, plumbers, accountants, pharmacists, lawyers, professors and engineers to do social work against their will.

There is no need for any form of conscription right now, but there is never a need for non-military conscription, and there never will be. Every American citizen has the right to strive for wealth through legal means without being pilloried as “greedy.”

The United States is not a socialist collective or a giant human beehive. It is a nation that thrives because of private enterprise, and we should never let our candidates forget that.