Evidently, Jonah Goldberg is receiving a lot of flak over his column on Obama's plan to force students to do community service. It doesn't surprise me, since race is the issue in this presidential race. Any time someone says anything that could be considered racial ("involuntary servitude"), it will be interpreted as a racist remark. Gee, is John Wiley Price on the Obama campaign?
Last week, on another blog, I mentioned Obama's plan for national service in response to a stupid argument that Democrats don't "legislate morality." This is bullshit, of course. Democrats just legislate different types of morality. For example, they like gay marriage and abortion and oppose 18 year olds drinking and people driving without seatbelts. Liberals oppose drilling our own oil (at least, for the moment) and support forcing people to pay for Amtrak and other forms of public transportation, even when such things are useless where you live.
If it supports traditional morality or makes you happy while minding your own business, liberals are against it. If it forces you to pay for things you oppose, they are for it.
Now, we have Barack Obama telling us that volunteerism is so good we have to be forced to do it. But as Goldberg points out, Americans already are the most generous people on Earth.
According to social demographer Arthur C. Brooks, in 1995 (the last year international comparative data on giving was available), Americans gave 3 1/2 times as much money to charities and causes as the French, seven times more than the Germans and 14 times more than the Italians.
In 1998, Americans also volunteered 21% more than the Swiss and 32% more than Germans -- two countries with compulsory national service.
People should do volunteer work because they want to do volunteer work, not because someone has decided to force people into it. At that point, it isn't really volunteer work at all, is it?
My problem with the whole forced volunteerism thing is twofold. First, anytime you have mandatory community service, the quality of that service will go down. Why? Because people who are forced to do things don't approach it with the same fervor as people who actually believe in the work they are doing. If you require that all students perform 50 hours of community service to graduate from high school, you'll get 50 hours of community service...and no more. Requirements cause people to feel less obligation to go above and beyond. Why should they? Someone else will pick up the slack.
The second problem I see is determining which organizations qualify for community service. If I go on a mission trip to build churches, does that count the same way reading to toddlers at the local library does? What if I volunteer to man the phones for a crisis pregnancy center? Who gets to determine what qualifies as acceptable volunteer work?
I do volunteer work through my church, but not all of that is religiously-affiliated. I suspect a lot of people get involved with organizations this way. They start with one group and gradually move to different groups over time. I'm not convinced that people would have this experience were they compelled to work. It's more blessed to give than receive, but it's more important to allow people the freedom to make those choices on their own.
Warren Street at Blue Girl, Red State shows his own inability to rebut Goldberg's arguments. "Hurr, hurr, he said 'founders' when discussing the 13th Amendment. Hurr, hurr, hurr." Yeah, Warren. It's not like people on the Left make any mistakes when referring to the Constitution. I mean, "founders" versus "authors" was the point of the essay.
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