Not necessarily so. Was working at Enron community service? How about BAT or Phillip Morris? The NYSE? You’d have to redefine the concept of “community service” in quite a twisted way to make any of those fit.
So what do you take it as? What could a civilian “security force” funded at equivalent levels to the military mean? Neighbors spying on neighbors? Citizens randomly screening other citizens’ email? I’m having a hard time imagining anything innocuous coming out of this.
If this is something like Clinton’s plan to put 100,000 police officers on the street, under supervision of cities, states, or municipalities, I’m OK with it. It’s a dumb meaningless campaign gesture, but not threatening. If it serves as a sensible place to employ demobilized Iraq/Afghanistan veterans, that’s good too. But I am against creating any more monster federal security agencies. First and foremost, how will we even pay for it? If you want more border guards, dismantle the DEA and transfer those people and budgets to ICE. As big as the deficit is, we need to be talking about reallocating expenses, not just blindly adding new ones.
As much as many people hate to admit it, being productive economically serves the community far more than a week spent working in a soup kitchen. The efforts of 200+ years of toil for the Man has created a national economy where even the most desperately poor in this country have access to shelter, food and usually a TV.
A soup kitchen is the front line in these efforts, but the results produced are very lopsided to the time spent in the activity. At the other extreme, look at Bill Gates. Poor little rich kid, drops out of college to fool with his computer, devotes hours and days of his time to develop Microsoft. Becomes crazy rich, and now that he has the time, donates Billions of Dollars to help all kinds of people.
I assume John Stossel is universally hated here, but in one of his books, he makes a delightful comparison between the effects of Mother Teresa v. Michael Milken. When broken down, guess who helped more people?
To bring it down to earth, most regular people make a cost/benefit analysis of the time and effort it takes to do some volunteer work, versus the good happy feelings and actual good work they do. We need both kinds of “community service” but in the long run, working and spending do more for society as a whole.
That’s why OB cannot make this work - forcing unpaid labor on people does not bring the benefit of that extra hour at work, or the shiny, happy feeling you get from doing good.
And, what I do with my time is none of your business. You can think I should feed the poor, build solar cells, or whatever, but so what? You may like the idea of helping the poor, but what happens when the government forces teenagers to provide free labor to build a church that was hit by lighting? I find that idea nauseating…
And even beside that point, think of all the people his company has employed. All of those people are not only supporting themselves, but paying taxes. And most of them are probably doing their own charitible giving.
This is the thing that would worry me the most about this kind of program. I don’t like the idea that the government might choose where I can do my charity work. We all pay taxes already to support government-run charity, and that’s fine. But what I do with my discretionary income and my time should be my own to decide. In my family, we support Catholic-run charities…all things that I think most people would think are worthwhile, like providing meals for the homeless, running toy drives at holiday time, etc. Right now, my time is involved with the fundraising efforts that provide need-based scholarships to my husband’s Catholic high school. I want my kids to be involved in these efforts when they are older, and I don’t like the idea that their time may be conscripted into other efforts not of our own choosing.
Well, that’s just absurd. It’s neither abstract nor worthless.
If private industry jobs weren’t important, nobody would be paid to do them. You NEED people to build houses, cut dies, sell clothing, inject plastic, fix cars, drive cabs, paint walls, turn lathes, do payroll, plant trees, and teach children. Those are valuable contributions to society, every bit as valuable as anything the government would pay or force you to do. If truck drivers all went on strike tomorrow you’d have an excellent chance of starving to death if the strike went on longer than a few weeks. That isn’t an exaggeration.
We have this discussion every time someone comes along and says “Hey, why not make young adults do public service for awhile?” or “Wouldn’t a draft be GOOD for kids? A couple of years in the Army, build your character!” Nobody has ever been able to adequately explain why a couple of years of working a normal job is any less useful, productive, or character-building.
[QUOTE=Not necessarily so. Was working at Enron community service? How about BAT or Phillip Morris? The NYSE? You’d have to redefine the concept of “community service” in quite a twisted way to make any of those fit.[/QUOTE]
Well, of course there are exceptions. There are exceptions in government service too. The guys who murdered a whole family so they could rape their teenaged daughter in Iraq were in government service; how about IRS agents who drive people to suicide? Dirty cops? There’s always ugly exceptions.
The better term you want is inaugurated.
Methinks we’ve gone a bit over the top here. Now we are comparing billionaire capitalists with iconic figures on a “cost benefit” basis. And we’ve inflated “public service” into a lifetime of slavery. We’re using the words “conscription” and “the draft” and referring to “a couple of years…”. Really!
The idea was for students to broaden their educations by serving some minimal number of volunteer hours with a charity or other public service organization of their choice. An hour or two a week, for a semester or two.
As I said earlier, I can offer personal testimony to the benefits realized by the charity, and by the student. Broadening one’s horizons and seeing for one’s self the needs, the struggles, and the lives of others (The direct beneficiaries of these efforts in my case happen to be animals, not people, but that does not change the main point.) is not necessarily something that everyone does as a matter of course. Clearly some in this thread have managed to avoid such enlightenment, by their own testimony. But that does not negate the positive changes, the growth and maturity, I have seen in individuals who were ‘forced’ into some minimal public service. And I offer my own personal judgement that these benefits acrue to society as a whole.
I too am astounded that others find anything ‘creepy’ about public service.
Yes. And I’d like to comment on the second part of Lobohan’s quote:
First of all, if investment bankers all disappeared tomorrow, you would miss them more than you could possibly imagine. You may see these kinds of jobs as non-productive and maybe bloodsucking, but they keep the economy going, and thereby ensure that we all have jobs to go to. Secondly, these programs aren’t about asking people to fill in for a lifeguard in an emergency situation, they are asking people to become lifeguards. There’s a world of difference. Someone does have to pay for the lifeguards, and that’s no small contribution.
The thought of some poor kitten or puppy in the hands of a kid who was forced to be there had added a whole new layer of “creepy” and “appaling” to this concept. :eek: 
Who is saying they aren’t important? First off, you’re responding to an argument that isn’t made. Private industry is important, but it’s not public service, except by the most degenerate description of public service.
You have an amazing grasp of the obvious. Without truckers people would starve, check.
Again arguing against something no one is fighting for. Who is talking about a Heinlienian stint in the Mobile Infantry?
You have made an utterly irrelevant post. Please go back and read the thread and try to trim down the appeals to emotion and knocking down of useless, unrelated straw men.
What I was arguing for, if you want to actually address it, is that working for a living serves you primarily. I get that you don’t think the nation deserves your help for free. Good for you. But if putting an option for public service in school will both help the country and get some small amount of people thinking about how they can make life better for others, as well as themselves then that will be good.
If you could, for instance get a social studies credit and some work experience doing something that benefits society and not spend any more time than would be spent in social studies class, where is the problem?
I don’t have a problem with bankers, or whatever someone intends to do with their lives. I’m a happy capitalist. You however are seem to think that making money helps people enough that you should be able to sit on your laurels and smugly smile about how you do your part to help this country. And that’s bullshit. Working at what you do helps you. It isn’t public service, by any stretch of the imagination.
In fact it’s a little arrogant.
Oh, good grief. People who like animals volunteer at animal shelters. People who like to dish out soup can volunteer at… well, you (should) get the idea.
The whole meme of coercion, and the derivative violence you imagine to be the result, is quite foreign to my actual experience. Care to offer anything besides idle speculation?
(By the way, mine are wild animals. Kid is really gonna be in for a surprise if he breaks away from supervision and tries to harm, say, an eagle. Not that such a thing has happened here in the past 30-plus years.)
The problem is, so far as I can tell, is that it will not be voluntary…
****emphasis mine
There is no option here. Our teenagers will be whored out to “serve your fellow man”.
Nonsense. Private industry provides services to the public. Ergo, it is a public service.
Don’t be silly. They’re still minors.
Double nonsense! Saying so dilutes the concept of public service to the point that it’s worthless.
Not all seniors are under 18. 
One of the main reasons I oppose the war in Iraq is how much it distracted this administration from the Millennium Development Goals which works similarly. Most of the MDGs will not meet their target of 2015 because of the lack of meaningful participation by a certain North American country. What would have a greater effect on terror? Spending $100 billion a year and 100,000 troops to chase a few assholes in the dessert, or taking those same resources to end poverty for the next billion? Which would increase respect and admiration for Western culture and values?
Its not just the cost of the war in Iraq, but the opportunity cost also. Obama does want to increase funding of the MDGs by $50 billion, which would make it as well funded as it needs to be, but far less than what we spend on the military.
Considering the nature of our society, it is more likely that teenagers will volunteer to help rebuild the church and then their parents will demand that those hours be counted towards their community service. Whether they should is another debate, though I would have no problem with such.
So unpaid internships and forced practicums should be abolished also then? Private industry likes to use unpaid labor as much as the government and non-profit sectors. And they use the same reasons for why it should be unpaid - the benefits received are supposedly greater than any income received for that task.
And while private industry may benefit the community, that has never been its primary or even secondary motive, but merely an externality, but it is the primary focus for most of the government and the non-profit sector. And while the private sector is great at providing private goods, it fails miserably at providing public goods, which is one reason we have so many non-profit and government agencies in this country. And both types are necessary for a successful community.
And I think people have neglected the primary reason Obama made this proposal - the model works. School districts across the country have added this requirement and have seen tangible benefits. And that model was based on how internships work in the private sector. He just wants to encourage all districts to do so, and will offer them incentives to make it happen. And I am sure that there are several districts that would never implement these programs. If they would rather raise taxes to maintain their schools then use federal money, I doubt Uncle Sam will mind.
And on preview, Sateryn76, schools have no right to federal money. Most conservatives would abolish the Department of Education and end federal involvement. I cant say I entirely disagree with sentiment. I belief local control is far better than national mandates, but that said, the federal government certainly has the right to attach any conditions they want on their assistance. That has been the MO since the beginning of the republic. The sad part is that local funding in rarely sufficient, and so additional funding from the state or feds is required.
And for a model of how it could work, check out http://www.volunteermatch.org/ Agencies that need help ask for volunteers, and volunteers look for agencies they want to help. I have not heard of a single program that mandates how and where students have to work, only the number of hours and possible course-work to evaluate the experience.
I think this is better expressed as “benefits the community” rather than “serves the community”. I was complaining about the missapropriation of the term “service”.
On the backs of billions of people without any of those, I’ll just observe…
I would not call Microsoft a Community Service. Bill Gates is now a philanthropist, but that’s not community service, it’s charity. Not the same thing
Community Service is sweat equity, not capital.
Milken was better than Teresa even before he turned philanthropist. At least the Junk Bonds scandal taught some people a little basic maths. Teresa…don’t get me started.
Guess I’m not regular people then - I don’t constantly do cost-benefit analyses to determine my actions.
I have yet had so-called “trickle down” economics explained to me in such a way that I buy it. But that’s beside the point - I wouldn’t call going shopping “community service”. I think it’s just what people tell themselves while they spend-spend-spend. Corporate Soma.
It has still to be shown that he’s talking about “forcing” anyone. So that whole point is a man of straw.
Sure - because you got yours, right?
And no, every person’s business is every other person’s business, unless you’re living in orbit in a closed system. Despite what most people like to think, the guy was right when he said No Man Is An Island.
Where in that quote does it say** anything** about the students being forced to participate? I’m sure schools get money for computer labs or swimming pools, doesn’t mean kids are forced to be geeks or lifesavers, now does it?
All that says is that schools will be given a strong combo carrot/stick to set up the programs. That’s pretty much in line with how federal funding works, isn’t it? If you’re OK with some federal involvement in education (not everyoneis, I know), then this is nothing unusual.