It’s a long way to Lent yet, but I guess I am going to have to start reading Barack Hussein Obama’s speeches. I caught his latest musings on “national service” thanks to Instapundit, but that came via Jonah Goldberg from PrestoPundit. How is he going to back away, triangulate, move to the center on this?
when I’m President, I will 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. This means that by the time you graduate college, you’ll have done 17 weeks of service. We’ll reach this goal in several ways. At the middle and high school level, we’ll make federal assistance conditional on school districts developing service programs, and give schools resources to offer new service opportunities.
The real name for this, as PrestoPundit noted, is a return to serfdom, i.e., the intrusion of the coercive arm of the state into everyday life.
For example, in France, citizens were required to perform public service building and repairing roads and other public projects for hundreds and thousands of hours a year. Serfdom wasn’t eliminated in France until the French revolution, one of the “liberty” parts of that revolution. It was largely the American revolution which inspired this escape from serfdom. Indeed, the American revolution was all about escaping from the European model of servitude, with the American’s insisting that even very moderate taxation without representation was a form of oppressive servitude. Incredibly, Barack Obama somehow believes that advocacy of a return to European style serfdom is a good way to celebrate the American Declaration of Independence from the oppression of English tyranny.
Let’s hope that people wake up to what an Obama administration would really be like–that they wake up to the coercive reality behind the bloviating rhetoric–before it is too late.
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8 Comments
1. fiona:We have this requirement in Florida - it descends into a sort of cheap trickery - volunteer at the polls and sit around chatting with your friends- volunteer at a local charity and do filing (often badly) you get the picture. For those kids who really choose to do volunteer time on projects they choose for themselves this is a good experience. For the majority, it is an exercise in cynicism.
Jul 4, 2008 - 6:22 pm 2. Lefroy:“Barak Hussein Obama”? We know what his middle name is, Roger, and you’re much, much better than that.
Jul 4, 2008 - 9:39 pm 3. Roger’s Rules » British “tyranny” and Obama’s tax plan:[...] in my post “Obama: Ask not what you can do for your country, but what your country can do to you,” I quoted PrestoPundit, who animadverted about Obama’s latest effort to bring us all [...]
Jul 5, 2008 - 3:56 am 4. Jon S.:Turns out Michelle wasn’t fibbing when she said her hubby will require us to work hard when he’s Community Organizer in Chief. Another good reason to vote against the Kid.
Really, if we had a serious media and not a transcription service for the Democratic Party, this astounding position would be ridiculed along with much of the other claptrap coming out of his campaign. What’s next: federal aid to be conditioned on school districts requiring the teaching of Esperanto?
Jul 5, 2008 - 6:03 am 5. Claudio Veliz, AIA:How does this proposal differ from Wm. F. Buckley’s, via “Gratitude”? In substance or in application/administration? See reference here: http://tinyurl.com/58grxa
Jul 5, 2008 - 8:02 am 6. Conservatives, Obama and Me. « The Life of the Mind:[...] Kimball, a conservative art critic and social commentator, referred to Obama as “Barack Hussein Obama” and, though I respect his art criticism and his [...]
Jul 5, 2008 - 11:37 am 7. Jay:Claudio. It seems that, based on so few fleshed out details we have here from both Obama and Buckley, that Obama is making his program conditional on a govt bureacracy, in this case education, to force “100 percent of its students” to do state controlled service programs. No doubt, given today’s constituencies in the teachers unions, inevitably for leftist causes.
Buckley seems in that interview to imply that his program would be volunteer only, and have no strings attached to federal funding.
I think they are both bad ideas, ripe for misuse. Obama’s from the outset, already raising flags.
Jul 5, 2008 - 2:00 pm 8. punditius:We have that requirement where I live. Students have to do X hours of “community service” in order to graduate from high school. The only thing that makes it palatable is that the service includes things like being an altar boy at church.
But Bam Bam is going to make kids serve the government. Funny - I thought that it was supposed to be the other way around, that government was supposed to serve the people. Silly me.
Jul 5, 2008 - 8:02 pm