The government ended jobs guarantees precisely to encourage military service.

While those problems are not insurmountable, proponents of job guarantees neglect the scale of this political-economic problem. FDR governed like a monarch, and thanks to a series of anti-corruption measures, the WPA was much more successful than it might have been. And yet even his job guarantee program was so beset by patronage and waste that it gave birth to the term “boondoggle.” Now imagine a job guarantee with the quality of governance under the current administration: One recession, and we’d have a permanent army of Border Patrol agents. If that sounds far fetched, don’t forget that the WPA was used to construct military facilities in America’s buildup to entering WWII, and was ultimately wound down to push public workers into military service.