Obama's National Service Plan: Silly but not Slavery

I have never wanted to like a presidential candidate as much as I want to like Barack Obama. He's a fresh face on the body politic, a Bears fan and a White Sox fan. What could ever be wrong with that?

If only he had read the Constitution sometime during his stint as a law student, editor of the Harvard Law Review and Constitutional Law lecturer. In addition to relinquishing our Fourth Amendment protections against illegal search and seizure while immunizing telecommunications companies who engage in such searches, now he is expanding federal budget support for faith-based institutions and also calling for a National Service Plan (fast forward to about 18:30 on the above video) that encumbers students into "service" outside the classroom. I'm getting ready to cry, "Enough!"

Obama's latest salvo is to promise to enact a National Service Plan that compels high school and college students to volunteer for community service. He pledges to “set a goal for all American middle and high school students to perform 50 hours of service a year, and for all college students to perform 100 hours of service a year.”

On it's face this seems benign enough, encouraging kids to give back to the community. Who can argue with that?

Here's the problem. Obama wants to tie federal funds for school districts to the notion that all the kids will participate in after school volunteer work. This will surely lead to less time away from the actual purpose of these federally subsidized schools: reading, writing and arithmetic. And this distraction would occur in exactly the school districts whose students likely need more time doing these basics.

Obama cites evidence that students who volunteer tend to do better in school and tend to go higher up the educational ladder into college. He assigns some type of cause and effect relationship to the act of community service in school bringing about better achievement later in life, which is completely illogical. What if we instead interpreted the statistic that the kids who are destined to go to college in the first place are more likely to have participated in volunteer work at a younger age and the act of volunteering-- while being somewhat predictive-- has no material beneficial causation on the kid's eventual educational level? The latter argument actually makes more sense to me, and I think David Hume would agree. I doubt community service causes good grades, and while I may believe that good students are more likely to have volunteered... I definitely know that causation could never be proven one way or another.

Furthermore, compelling unmotivated kids to pursue non-academic work may have several unintended consequences: possibly higher drop-out rates, poorer grades and decreased federal funding for districts that most need it. So, what's the point, Mr. Obama?

Of course, we can always rely on right wing slobs like Jonah Goldberg to take the extreme view, and Goldberg has gone so far as to call Obama's National Service Plan "slavery." It's not slavery, but Obama's plan is silly at best, and counter-productive at worst.

Obama's plan calls for $4000 per year for college students if they perform 100 hours of community service. Slavery? Hardly. In fact, as a taxpayer my question is rather what college student is worth $40 of tax revenue per hour to the community? Answer: not many. Perhaps incentives for students to pursue necessary majors would make more sense.

My other question for the Senator is why pick on students to perform this supposedly necessary community service? Students-- or at least successful students-- are busy enough without ramping up their work load even "just 2 hours a week." And even if they're not busy and can afford the small time commitment, who is the federal government to compel the use of their time? If the volunteer work is truly necessary, then why not get the lazy bastards who sit around the trailer park to go out and bang a few nails and pick up cups on the interstate? And leave college students alone. What about compelling high school dropouts, unemployed mortgage lenders, white collar criminals and even shrill right wing political pundits to "volunteer"? If the experience is oh-so beneficial, surely those on the margins would be well-served volunteering their time-- maybe even more so than the already achieving students.

This really goes back to the purpose of the federal government, which according to my recollection is to regulate interstate commerce, defend our borders and engage in foreign policy (none of which we are currently doing very well I might add.) This mission has been expanded to also manage large-scale socially necessary programs like Social Security and Medicare, which makes sense to me although strict Constitutional devotees have raised argument over the years. Even John F. Kennedy's Peace Corps for college graduates was really an offshoot of our diplomatic missions around the world and thus fell under the purview of the federal government. But Obama's National Service, not so much.

If inner city kids need better schools, then build them better schools. I would even argue that it is an issue of national security to ensure that every kid can read, write, add and subtract-- and, again, this is not being done very well at present. If college kids need financial support, then provide it and perhaps make it contingent on something tangible to our national welfare such as certain fields of study like engineering and science, achievement of good grades or completion of a degree. Even compelling college students to pay back service once they've completed their studies makes more sense than to encumber them while they should be focused on getting their degree.

Six months ago, I would would have been hard-pressed to even imagine how I could hesitate to vote Democratic this November. In 2004 I cast my first ever straight party vote against the Republican authoritarians. Now we are seeing the silly side of liberal authoritarianism, and it's getting sillier by the day.