So What’s So Bad About Forced Labor Again?

The Idaho Statesman posted excerpts of my piece on Obama’s forced national service with this headline, “Serving the Community is a Good Thing, Right?”

Serving the community is great, but we did people who have a heart to serve the community, not people being forced. I also see little reason for government to set the priorities for what this service should like and what it should do.  That’s not government’s role. Nor is it government’s role to dictate the schedule of every middle schooler as if bureaucrats know what’s going on in every child’s life.

I’m not a statist. I do not worship government as God and believe that all solutions from there. They don’t. They should flow out from the grassroots and the hearts of people who think that the places they live are worth serving, loving, and fight for. If all we can produce our Barack Obama’s forced volunteers or his $40 per hour paid forced volunteers (double oxymoron there) than we’re just re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic, as our underlying culture is doomed.