Michele Catalano writing at Pajamas Media yesterday, defending Obama’s call for (at one point) mandatory community service, gets it completely wrong. To backtrack a little bit for those who haven’t been paying attention the last week or so, at President Elect Obama’s website, www.change.gov, there’s an agenda section. At one point part of it read like this:
Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by developing a plan to require 50 hours of community service in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in college every year
(emphasis mine)
This quickly led to a swarm of criticism. Some of course went slightly overboard and likened it to slavery, as the opportunity to note the irony was just too hard to pass up I suppose. Others saw this as Obama building his “Marxist” personal army.
Now those points can be argued against and rightfully so, but that doesn’t mean their main thrust is wrong. Reacting to the criticism, the well oiled Obama online team quickly replaced the text, taking out the required part and changing it to an incentive based service. So good for them, but the piece by Michele Catalano defending it is defending the wrong aspect.
There are thousands upon thousands of high school and college students, as well as adults, doing some form of community service right now. Service to your community is an altruistic thing; it is a way of perhaps giving back to a community that has given to you. It is a way to reach out to a community, to help others who may not be as fortunate as you, to teach young adults about sharing, caring, and helping others, to do something out of the goodness of your heart that will benefit your community. This is not slavery. This is not forced labor. This is outreach. It represents values. Slavery is an act that benefits no one but the person who owns the slave; community service benefits both the giver and receiver and helps make the world a better place and leaves a general good feeling for everyone involved. It is not comparable to slavery.
(emphasis again is mine)
Respectfully to Michele, yes, this is exactly forced labor. Look, no one is saying the end is a bad result, it’s the means with which it’s achieved that is wrong. There was benefit from slavery but that doesn’t mean it’s not wrong, and who benefits has nothing to do with its definition. If you had a slave you could have him or her volunteer at the homeless shelter every day and do a lot of good, but it would still be completely immoral to do so, not because of the work that the person is doing but because the person has no choice.
So this is where she gets it wrong. No one criticising the required language is arguing community service is bad, or not a lofty goal. Millions of people think serving the army is a tremendous good that benefits both giver and receiver (receiver being the US citicizens of course), but no one argues that the draft is either moral or a good idea. So defenders can talk about how much good community service can do all they want, but they need to remember no free man should be compulsed into your definition of “doing good for the community”.
It’s not like they are volunteering for free; they get money towards college. I think it’s a great idea!
Kay,
I have no structural issues with the plan as it’s it now presented, as long as it’s not compulsory. I’m not sure the govt can afford to spend the money for this army of community service people, but that’s beside the point.
>>>No one…is arguing community service is bad.
Ahem. I would. I hate community service. It has always been and always will be a devious and stupid way to get around actually paying people for their labor. If you have a job that needs doing, hire someone to do it. It will get done better and faster than work via guilt-trip or forced labor…and redound greater economic benefits to the community every time.
After all, the most effective way to genuinely redistribute wealth from rich to poor is to hire the poor to perform real work, for real wages. It’s kind of amusing, and perhaps even revealing, that the people who favor wealth distribution via the tax system, seem most passionately supportive of community service (unpaid labor).
>>but no one argues that the draft is either moral or a good idea
Actually there are quite a few people who unfortunately do that (on both left and right).
“Community Service” is getting off the dole so the “Community” doesn’t have to “Service” you.
I think that the church based volunteering that I’ve been exposed to is very good. For one thing, when I was tutoring English in CA, the people were very nice and were working very hard to make their lives better. It’s nice to help people… particularly when you can know it really helped. It’s getting a couple casseroles from the other ladies when you come home with the new baby… that sort of thing. Or a suit to wear to interviews from the charity closet at church.
OTOH, I sort of agree with Lee, too. The idea that we owe the community our free labor is sort of nasty. We might have a moral obligation to keep our eye out for our neighbor, but that’s on our terms as an individual to individual transaction.
The idea that people *ought* to take all this time to volunteer labor for the community good really does embody an assumption that the beneficiaries of the labor have a right to expect it. And paying college students $40 an hour to do the proper sorts of “volunteer” work? It really is much much better to hire someone who needs the money if they apply for that job, which certainly won’t be $40 an hour for unskilled labor, if they are putting themselves through college or if they just have to pay their rent.
Obama and his leftist illuminati “forcing” community service seems to be counter-productive. One wonderful thing about community service when it is rightfully done, it is beneficial for those being helped and the helpers. Having a forced approach to it, I’m not sure how effective the “helping” will be and how industrious some of the kids will be