http://www.time.com/…

At various times in American history, public service and private effort

went arm in arm. After Pearl Harbor, Rosie the Riveter and Uncle Sam exhorted people to help the war effort, and Americans responded. But since F.D.R., and especially since J.F.K.’s launching of the Peace Corps, national service has been seen by some as a Democratic or liberal idea. In the ’90s, Newt Gingrich argued that the rise of big government programs robbed people of their initiative to volunteer. After Bill Clinton signed the bill to create AmeriCorps in 1993, then Senator John Ashcroft called it “welfare for the well-to-do.”

But these days there is a growing consensus on Capitol Hill that the private and public spheres can be linked. Democrats understand the need to support programs outside of government; Republicans understand that voluntary programs can be helped by government. In his first State of the Union address after 9/11, President George W. Bush called for Americans to give 4,000 hours of service and established the USA Freedom Corps. One of the early critics of AmeriCorps, John McCain, has since become a devout supporter. “National service is an issue that has been largely identified with the Democratic Party and the left of the political spectrum,” McCain wrote in a 2001 Washington Monthly essay. “That is unfortunate, because duty, honor and country are values that transcend ideology…National service is a crucial means of making our patriotism real, to the benefit of both ourselves and our country.”

THE PLAN

So what would a plan for universal national service look like? It would be voluntary, not mandatory. Americans don’t like to be told what they have to do; many have argued that requiring service drains the gift of its virtue. It would be based on carrots, not sticks — “doing well by doing good,” as Benjamin Franklin, the true father of civic engagement, put it. So here is a 10-point plan for universal national service. The ideas here are a mixture of suggestions already made, revised versions of other proposals and a few new wrinkles.

1. Create a National-Service Baby Bond
2. Make National Service a Cabinet-Level Department
3. Expand Existing National-Service Programs Like AmeriCorps and the National Senior Volunteer Corps
4. Create an Education Corps
5. Institute a Summer of Service
6. Build a Health Corps
7. Launch a Green Corps
8. Recruit a Rapid-Response Reserve Corps
9. Start a National-Service Academy
10. Create a Baby-Boomer Education Bond

Voluntary? Really? How long would that last? How voluntary is the collection of funds to pay for all this proposed government expansion.

I like:

The last time we demanded anything else from people was when the draft ended in 1973. And yes, there are libertarians who believe that government asks too much of us — and that the principal right in a democracy is the right to be left alone — but most everyone else bemoans the fact that only about half of us vote and don’t do much more than send in our returns on April 15.

He acts as if the theft of trillions of dollars from millions of people by the threat of violence isn’t worth complaining about.

A republic, to survive, needed not only the consent of the governed but also their active participation. It was not a machine that would go of itself; free societies do not stay free without the involvement of their citizens.

A free society can’t be free with involvement of their citizens. Involvement can’t mean anything but an increase in government power being abused. The only free government is no government.

When Americans look around right now, they see a public-school system with 38% of fourth graders unable to read at a basic level; they see the cost of health insurance escalating as 47 million people go uninsured; they see a government that responded ineptly to a hurricane in New Orleans; and they see a war whose ends they do not completely value or understand.

So this guy is advocating a huge growth in government to combat huge growth in government? That’ll fix it. Just like Bernanke’s inflation will fix inflation. Is it really so difficult for these fascists to do that little bit of introspection necessary to see the contridictions in their system? They are in denial.

Polls show that while confidence in our democracy and our government is near an all-time low, volunteerism and civic participation since the ’70s are near all-time highs. Political scientists are perplexed about this. If confidence is so low, why would people bother volunteering? The explanation is pretty simple. People, especially young people, think the government and the public sphere are broken, but they feel they can personally make a difference through community service. After 9/11, Americans were hungry to be asked to do something, to make some kind of sacrifice, and what they mostly remember is being asked to go shopping. The reason private volunteerism is so high is precisely that confidence in our public institutions is so low. People see volunteering not as a form of public service but as an antidote for it.

It’s just amazing. This statist is saying that voluntary private charity is a negative. Instead of recognizing that people are starting to notice, perhaps unconsciously, that government is an abject failure… he’s saying that people are doing private voluntarism because public “service” isn’t available because the government sucks because they are doing private voluntarism.

That is not a recipe for keeping a republic.

Damn right it’s not. He can keep his republic. It was a quaint experiment. It’s led us to fascism. Time to move on.

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