Your serve

My friend Justyn has a couple quibbles with my recent column on national service. Time to bring one more blog into the fray. Point by point:

1. You didn’t address public schools!

It’s true that I didn’t address national service policies that won’t affect current college students. Alas, there’s only so much room on page four, and so much interest from the average college student before they flip over to the sudoku. However, the proposed policy for K-12 schools—to make federal funding for public schools contingent on some sort of national service program—is even worse than the tax credit, because it’s both less voluntary and more insidious.

Contra Justyn’s original column, which surmised that tying federal cash to service programs “seems contrary to the spirit of what Obama is trying to do,” Sen. Obama has said directly that “we’ll make federal assistance conditional on school districts developing service programs.” There is no doubt that this means mandatory service for most, with the dirty work delegated down from the federal government to local school boards.

I object to this sort of plan on moral, consequential, and constitutional grounds. But I especially object to it out of respect for federalism. Tying federal money to local policies is a nasty little trick that allows the federal government to muck around in all sorts of places where it doesn’t belong. The way this plan would be implemented is just like the 1984 National Minimum Drinking Age Act, which required states to raise their drinking ages to 21 as a condition of receiving federal highway funds. Technically, nobody was “forced” by that bill, but it didn’t matter much—today a 20-year old can’t buy a sixer of Sam Adams anywhere in our federal Union. Leaving local democracy to the mercy of the federal government is a recipe for no local democracy at all.

If a local school board wants to put a community service requirement in place, they have every right to do so, and indeed, many already have. But the federal government has no place dictating policy to the Waldorf County Board of Education. Not on national service, not on standardized testing, not on curriculum.

The “require” rather than “encourage” bit came from Obama’s website, and is supported by statements from his wife Michelle.

2. Separating “government” from “private” matters “stems entirely from the notion that any form of government is alien to and opposed to the way people actually live and conduct their lives.”

I don’t think this is true. Government isn’t opposed to the way people live—it’s been a feature of pretty much every human civilization since forever, and people have been living with it for at least that long. As I see it, government is just a tool for implementing collective choice, and often kind of a sucky one that makes people do things they don’t want. That doesn’t make it inherently more evil than any other kind of sucky things that can make people do things they don’t want—muggers, big terrible corporations, angry mothers, &c.

There shouldn’t be a Great Wall between private and government matters, especially when it comes to the sort of civil society volunteer stuff we’re talking about here. Both are just methods of social organization. The difference is that government, which uses force instead of consensus, often has nastier unintended consequences and bigger failures.

3. Hiring the unemployed at market wages rather than overpaying college students is kind of mean.

I’ll admit that this is my least persuasive point, because I don’t think government ought to be hiring anyone at all to do these “national service” sort of jobs. But, under the assumption that we must have some sort of national service program, I’d prefer that it stays as inexpensive as possible.

The reason nobody’s lining up to fill the jobs now is that they aren’t jobs. They’re volunteer positions, for which the market wage is effectively zero or negative. The “hard-up workers” are out there looking for real jobs. Thus, any national service program offering a stipend or a tax write-off is also something of a make-work scheme. But yeah, you’ve got me on this one—it comes down to whether you value the amorphous intangible social benefits of national service more than its outrageous cost.