"Millions of Americans want to help their community, their country, their world," the cover of Time magazine informs. "Here's a plan to put those ideals into action." Leaving aside, temporarily, the question of why a news magazine is advocating a "plan" for a political program, Time's cover seems to suggest that without such a plan Americans are impotent to "help their community, their country, their world." In fact, the accompanying article admits that "volunteerism and civic participation since the '70s are near all-time highs." What's the point, then? Well, those volunteers serve society. Time wants them to serve government.

"Today the two central acts of democratic citizenship are voting and paying taxes," Time complains. "That's basically it." But is it? People run for office, donate to charity, protest, write letters to newspapers, etc. That they do this outside the purview of a government program, for Time, is tantamount to not doing it at all. Partisans of the total state are greedy, desirous of all charity, volunteerism, and funds to benefit leviathan.

Among the magazine's grandiose designs are a cabinet-level bureaucracy for national and community service, a "summer of service" for rising high-school freshmen, a "green corps" to "combat climate change," and a national-service academy, an idea whose originators, Time notes, "wanted to create a new generation of people who were idealistic about government." So did Hitler, which is probably why he created the Hitler Youth--to indoctrinate young people into the state-worshipping religion. Rather than impart idealism in the already naive, why not instill cynicism? It would certainly give them a clearer picture of the state than a government indoctrination center.

Glaring are the excessive direct costs and the propagandistic, self-serving element of a government program to instill idealism for the state. But also damaging is the program's intent to extract hundreds of thousands of young adults from the natural economy to insert them into the artificial, government supported economy. Removing presumably talented twentysomethings from the hiring pool for jobs the free market supports, i.e., necessary jobs, the program would burn the economy at both ends. At one end, able workers would waste time as camp councillors, as environmentalist activists, and in other inane, nonsense-work tasks. At the other end, jobs that would have contributed to the economy won't, because the people who might have filled them are off planting a bush, picking up trash in a playground, or doing some other make-work now performed by men in orange jumpsuits.

So why is Time, a news magazine, manufacturing demand for this idiocy? Because it's an important part of Hillary Clinton's platform, and when she highlights it on the stump she won't look like a fool demanding something that there is so little demand for. Better than enact what Time wants, why not subtract the Peace Corps, Americorps, and other such unconstitutional welfare programs for do-gooders from the ledgers of the federal government? You won't see a Time cover piece calling for that. Nor should you, and that's perhaps Time's main sin--not pushing this program or that program, but pushing an agenda behind the guise of news. Like Newsweek's hysteric global-warming cover story last month, Time's piece on national service reads like a poorly written speech by a small-town politician. Advocacy journalism makes for amateurish journalism.

For example, one imagines the author--so taken by his words--orating in the mirror, arms waving histrionically, American flag behind him, the following lines: "But at this moment in our history, 220 years after the Constitutional Convention, the way to get citizens involved in civic life, the way to create a common culture that will make a virtue of our diversity, the way to give us that more capacious sense of 'we'--finally, the way to keep the Republic--is universal national service. No, not mandatory or compulsory service but service that is in our enlightened self-interest as a nation."

But what is universal service but another name for compulsory service? Certainly the subsidy for such high-priced "volunteerism" would be compulsory. No thanks. I declare myself a conscientious objector.

Yep, no left leaning biased, water carrying media here. Just jumping on that Hillary train to socialism.

Instill idealism about government in our youth? Gag me with a spoon.

"Rather than impart idealism in the already naive, why not instill cynicism?"

Right on.

Doesn't that cover drawing look like a Soviet style
propaganda poster?
You'd think they would at least try to be a little more subtle.
I had to double check just to make sure that wasn't a hammer and sicle tattoo on that girls arm....sick stuff!

It does, Ross, but I think unintentionally so. They were going for the WWII Rosie the Riviter theme. But, if you look at Soviet-style propaganda posters (I have some prints of twenty or so such posters I picked up in Prague) they are not that different from the propaganda posters put out here. It's hard for people to recognize their own nation's propaganda as propaganda, but you tend to see it when it's lined up alongside more obvious propaganda from afar.