That’s not even remotely what I said.
In Russia, pony wants you.
Which is how Catherine the Great got into trouble. 
I took what you said to mean that working and making a lot of money was public service. If you didn’t mean that I humbly retract my comment.
As for the voluntary/involuntary thing, what I took from what Obama said was that the school has to have the program available. Not that the kids have to do it.
And even if it were a requirement that was no more time consuming than a social studies credit, I still wouldn’t be against it.
So, in your mind, Bill Gates going down to the soup kitchen and serving up 1 bowl a soup at a time is community service, but Bill Gates donating a brazillion dollars to others so they can serve up thousands of soup bowls at a time is not?
Yes.
To put it another way, Bill Gates’ money pays for other people to do community service, but what Bill himself does, while admirable and all, is not community service.
I am, of course, not counting those times Bill himself might work on the front lines, as it were.
Personally, I don’t think of having a regular job as “public service” in the same way that volunteerism is. But it’s necessary, and it spreads around a lot of good.
More significantly, for someone who can generate enough wealth in an hour to hire a thousand soup spooners to instead ladle soup himself is just stupid. Worse, it sanctimoniously puts someone’s desire to feel good about himself ahead of the needs of the 999 people who got left out of the soup kitchen as a result.
Nobody’s arguing against that, either. For a guy who’s quick to paint opposing arguments as straw men, it took you very little time to build one of your own.
You’re quite missing the point. But to be fair, I don’t think the point has been well made, so I’ll give it a shot.
This isn’t an issue of who “deserves” what. (For that matter, it’s not an issue of what’s “Creepy” or not, which I agree is an exaggeration of Obama’s statements.) I don’t care who deserves what; geez, who lives that way? I don’t give my kid stuff because I think she deserves it, I give her stuff because I like to give her stuff. I give to charity because I think it’s right to do so, not because I’ve made some determination that someone “deserves” my help, beyond the most cursory of common sense screening to make sure it isn’t a scam.
What’s at issue here is whether this is a good idea in a straightforward, cost-benefit analysis. The old “public service” saw, which gets trotted out all the time, operates on two assumptions, both of which you’ve already made (see your quoted text above) so please don’t claim that these are straw men:
- That it’ll help the country (or state, city, etc.) and
- That it’s good for the person doing the service.
I have never seen any evidence, or even for that matter a convincing logical argument, that either statement is true. The problem with #1 is not that people can’t render valuable public services, but that the opportunity costs involved are always ignored. A person who’s doing her mandatory public service isn’t doing something else potentially useful; you’re diverting labor from where the economy would have allocated it to where the myriad government service programs want it. Presumably in some cases it might be useful, but in many others it likely won’t be. Again, I have to point out that if something was really worth doing, someone is usually paying someone to do it, or volunteers are already volunteering.
You seem to imply that working for a living, because it serves me, must therefore not be to the benefit of society the same way volunteering is. Again, I’m just going by what you said:
Well, do you have any evidence that’s true? If someone is willing to pay to have something done, it’s likely valuable. What’s the evidence that that system of getting work done is less societally beneficial than any government public service program likely to be created by an Obama administration?
Taking Obama’s ideas to their limit - and of course it’s 97% likely Congress would shoot down his more ambitious ideas, but let’s play with the statement as it was made - would cost billions of dollars and billions of hours of people’s time, and you’re introducing only Christ knows how many massively wasteful boondoggles. I almost hate to point this out because it’s such a common right wing meme, but it simply is true and has to be practically considered; the government is ludicrously, absurdly, comically wasteful. No private enterprise could survive wasting money and people’s time the way government does; all those that do, die. I’m not even talking about wasting the time of the people doing the service, though that will happen; just the bureacracy that would be created to serve Obama’s plan would eat up a staggering amount of money and employ hundreds, eventually thousands, of people as federal employees grinding away at the program. Maybe you’d get good value out of it, but a brief review of the history of large-scale government projects suggest a two part answer to that question:
a. No, you wouldn’t, and
b. Those few occasions when you could argue it was worth the money are almost wholly restricted to externality problems, like maintaining an army or building a highway system.
In terms of local volunteerism and little jobs and people’s time, the likelier scenario is that a lot of people will end up wasting their time.
As to claim 2, I simply do not buy it, sorry - again, in the context of opportunity cost. You can get a lot out of volunteering, I do not doubt that. You can also get a lot out of working a normal job. You can get a lot out of playing a sport, or joining a club, or going backpacking across Europe, or reading, or spending time with your family, or going on a canoeing trip on Georgian Bay. You can get a lot out of volunteering on your own as opposed to under Obama’s plan, as in fact millions do. Unless you have some evidence to the contrary, why should anyone believe that a particular government-run public service program will provide people with character-building experiences superior to the ones they would have had without spending all the money on the program?
He can, but does he?
In any case, I’d like to meet the high-schooler with that kind of wealth and the maturity to use it that way.
That’s just sad that you would think that way. I can think of few things more admirable than people working their butts off to provide for themselves and to keep themselves off the public teat. When I see that behavior in others, I find it something to admire, not pity. And the values of self-reliance and hard work used to be core American values, not something to be pitied.
It’s far, far better for everyone to look after themselves and build a strong economy where there are relatively few unemployed and destitute, than to have everyone be less productive and therefore have a society where there are large numbers of destitute and unemployed, with people working in soup kitchens to help feed them instead of doing what they’re really good at.
If you’re an engineer, the best way you can help society is to what you’re good at - engineering. You’re not helping society much at all if you spend time you could have spend on engineering ladling soup in a kitchen.
It may make you feel personally virtuous to pour soup in a kitchen, but it’s of far less value to society.
Immaterial - the choice to spend your money on hookers and blow should be yours alone.
I wasn’t familiar with that program. In Alberta, we had no such thing. And yes, I think that’s a stupid program.
As someone pointed out, if this community service is such a good thing, why don’t politicians ever come up with programs that ‘incentivize’ baby boomers to do it? How about a program which denies tax breaks to companies unless they show that 25% of their employees do community service? After all, middle-aged adults know far more and are more productive than kids, so their time would be much more valuable, right?
Of course, the answer is that people only vote for things other people should do. Kids don’t vote, so they’re fodder for demagoguery. If Obama looked in the camera and said, “I expect YOU to volunteer, and I’m going to set up incentive programs to ensure that the company you work for will be punished if it fails to ‘encourage’ you to spend 50 hours a year doing public service”, he’s lose the election.
It’s funny that liberals are all too willing to equate financial disincentive with force when it’s private companies doing it - they’ll claim that a company forces someone to go without health care by not offering it, and when a conservative points out that no one forced the employee to take the job, the response is that they had no choice because they are poor and need the work, so it’s force.
But when the government uses economics to drive behavior, and threatens to withold needed money from public schools where the parents of kids literally do not have a choice to go elsewhere, suddenly that’s not ‘force’.
It seems to me that since public schools absolutely need the federal funds, and most people have no choice but to send their kids to public school because the tuition is being taken from them by force in the form of taxes, then a threat to withold funding is essentially the same as saying, “You have to let us educate your child, but we’re not going to do it properly unless your child volunteers for work the state thinks your child should do.”
Gee, Sam, even back in those far away days when I taught high school, many, many sawgrass seasons ago, I don’t think I ever met a single one who was a productive and functioning engineer. And I don’t think I’ve met a single high school student since who had that particular qualification. I hardly think volunteerism will prevent engineers from engineering, in high school or not. (Does it take an engineer to construct a strawman?)
To repeat, this is about students volunteering an hour or two of their time a week, for a semester or so, at a “community service” entity of their choice. Not about free slave labor to recreate massive WPA projects at enormous taxpayer expense or to put poor upstanding businessmen out of work via unfair competition.
Sheesh. Kids waste more time than that, deciding which shirt to wear or ‘hanging out’ at the mall. It’s not like high school kids are so desperately pressed for time.
This is about teaching them, and even helping to nudge them, to become involved with their community. Something that our increasingly insular society seems to have drawn away from, much to our loss.
Right, but why should it be the federal government’s responsibility to teach kids “to become involved with their community” in the first place? These kids have parents, right? They have neighborhoods, social structures? Let them learn about the importance of community and volunteerism from them.
Arguably, volunteer service can be considered a form of education. Young people could try hands-on skills, become acquainted with problems in their community, get to know people who would otherwise be outside of their circle, learn to work and cooperate as part of a team, and learn the satisfaction that comes from helping someone else. There are many people who never get this kind of education and never will unless they are given some reason to try it.
I understand this interpretation will not fly with conservatives who consider the Department of Education a socialist affront in any case, but just to show you can make the argument that there is actual value in acquainting people with community service at a young age.
By force or coercion? For their own good?
This leaves aside why the government would be the best teacher of our children for altruism or self sacrifice for the common good and the benefit of the good workers and peasants…
…Er, never mind that last part. I mean for the people of course.
I know this isn’t going to fly with liberals who consider the Department of Education a triumph of social engineering, but just wanted to show that strawmen are both easy and fun to build, and that people actually could see the creepiness factor and the slippery slope this might entail and not necessarily be raving right wing loons. I see no value in forced, coerced or even government funded, administered and promoted volunteer programs of this nature. If people want to volunteer for such things on their own then more power to em…there are plenty of such programs at both a local and national level that enables them to do so. If you want to fund such programs via the government tit…well, I’m less inclined to that outlook myself, but as with a root canal, sometimes you have to do distasteful things. However, to promote such programs AND fund them in this way is going beyond the root canal here…it’s into the territory of being raped by a group of rabid pygmies dressed in clown suits.
Creepy AND more than just slightly distasteful. I’d rather leave it to the individual to decide if that’s REALLY what they want…and let those in this thread (and Obama etc) who are purportedly all for it to privately fund it to their hearts content. Knock yourselves out folks…just don’t ask the rest of us to pay for it, ehe?
-XT
Regarding the $4000 tax credit for college kids…
Completely incorrect. If it’s a $4000 tax credit, the recipient can’t benefit from it unless they have an income tax burden (meaning that they have to get a job). It would make students more likely to get summer jobs, not less.
Coming soon from Regnery Books, a division of Remainder House, One Day in the Life of Brendan Denisovich, the saga of one teen’s survival of a brutal Obamist “volunteer camp”…
The dread crunch of liberal jackboots draws ever nearer…
We could employ several hundred thousand just going around the country giving neck massages and chamomile tea to hysterical tighty righties losing their shit over Obama, or Stalin Lite, as some might have it.
Get thee a grip, verily! How many times have you heard a politician run this particular dreamscape out for the pony show? Dozens, maybe? Does it ever actually go anywhere? There are all kinds of “youth programs” out there, and many, many more posited as theoretical excercises that never saw a megabuck of funding, because nobody can decide what the priorities will be. Conservation? Sure, long as that doesn’t mean tree-hugging environmentalism. Community work? You’re going to send my kid to the inner city to be knifed by a crack head?! Here’s a note from his orthodontist, he has very delicate braces…
Relax. Obama ain’t a radical. I oughta know, I am a radical. Chilleth.
Everything in school is done by force or coercion. Otherwise they’d call it “hanging out by the pool”.