Michele Catalano is wrong about Obama's community service plan

She writes:

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.

The essence of slavery is forced labor, irrespective of compensation. It is the coercive act of saying to someone "you have no choice, but to do the work I dictate to you." It doesn't matter whether or not the person is compensated for it or supported by it in some capacity. The purest essence of slavery is being forced to perform work at someone's command without any option to avoid it. If Obama ties community service to federal funding of schools, he is most certainly adding involuntary service--slavery--to the curriculum. Focusing on the duration and even compensation, don't change the fact that it is involuntary labor.

What Michele calls a matter of values here is better discussed in the terms that Martin Luther used for describing the fundamental problem of trying to instill virtue in those who, on their own, would have nothing to do with it:

"What can only be taught by the rod and with blows will not lead to much good; they will not remain pious any longer than the rod is behind them."

A similar principle applies here. Students who are not disposed to do community service will most likely end up deeply resenting the policy, and will not continue volunteering. If anything, it is more likely to make them cynical about volunteering again.

On the college level, Obama's plan would ensure a $4,000 tuition credit to students who complete 100 hours of community service a year. With the cost of college education soaring, that $4,000 is like a windfall to a college student. The student would be rewarded monetarily, but the reward of completing service toward the community is something that will stay with them, as well as the community, forever. Service to others is a lasting gift.

Here again, Michele is missing the bigger picture. The result of Obama's policy would have been to flood charities with unmotivated "volunteers" and to risk further inflating the cost of college tuition by a few thousand dollars. It's also long been observed by critics of federal funding of higher education that efforts to create tax credits and guaranteed student loans have created cushion for universities that has prevented them from having to find ways to cut costs.

Service to others is a lasting gift, but forced service is not. From the perspective of someone who is predisposed to seeing serving others as an inherent good, this may be a distinction without a difference, but to many Americans it is deeply offensive. It is deeply offensive because many Americans are still very independent people who scoff not at the idea of serving others, but at even the perception of someone telling them that they must do that. There is still some trace of the spirit of rebellion and independence left in the American character, and it chafes against proposals to make people do things against their will.

It's interesting how many right-leaning blogs are frowning upon the community service idea, though some are being thoughtful about it. Generally, people on the political right tend to belong to churches, and churches are big proponents of community service. So why the negativity?

It's the difference between a volunteer army and a conscript army. With a service-oriented church, you are there because you want to be there to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ through acts of service. No one shows up to such a church on Sunday because they are forced to because the government assigned them to a church, and their family doesn't have the money to take them out of that church and put them in a church of their choosing. Yet, that is precisely the situation that is faced by most students in public schools; their parents simply don't have the resources to put them in a school of their choosing, which automatically puts them in a position of having no choice but to perform service.

Another reason why evangelical Christians have a serious problem with this proposal is that we believe that service should be motivated by personal conviction, and we are not so idealistic as to believe that most public school students would fit that description under this plan. In many respects we could not blame them either, as the plan appeals to their desire to graduate, and not on a higher level to do service. For that reason, we recognize that even though the fist of the state is wearing a velvet glove, instead of an steel gauntlet, the fist of the state is still aimed at the student's face through the possibility of being penalized academically, at a government school they most likely had no option of not attending.

This is not socialism. This is not Marxism. This is the mark of a country that knows it needs to rely on those who can to help those who can't. It's the mark of a country that knows it needs to depend on its citizens to make their communities flourish. It's taking the "ask not what your country can do for you" attitude and transforming it into smaller clusters, where we ask what we can do for those we live with and around, instead of waiting for people to do for us. It's how communities become stronger, how they grow, and how a strong, giving community makes for a strong, giving nation.

Aside from the fact that giving students $4,000 for a mere 100 hours of service (the equivalent of about $83,200 in income per year) is indeed socialistic, there is a potential warning sign here. If America is indeed having to resort to incentives and coercion to create civic participation, that's the sign of a culture in decline. Kennedy would, no doubt, be horrified of the thought of a President offering a carrot-and-stick proposal for responding to the call of what one can do for one's country.