GIVE back

There is a long tradition of giving government bills marshmallow-sweet acronyms. House bill 1388, which passed recently with the GIVE Act title, is no exception. But the GIVE Act’s main implication is to use college students to take from taxpayers—and maybe even commandeer you to do so.

That is, the bill sets up a committee to investigate, “Whether a workable, fair and reasonable mandatory service requirement for all able young people could be developed.”

If service becomes mandatory for all young people, you might ask why the fuss—isn’t this just a different version of a military draft, necessary in times of crisis?

But there is a marked difference between forced military service and mandatory civil service. Military service is for defense. Civil service is about charity.

And since you cannot legally defend your country militarily, without joining the military, while you can do charity with full liberty, there is no reason to compare the two.

Besides, despite the vast size and diversity of our military’s endeavors (construction, combat, intelligence), the function of the military remains solely defense, whereas civil service or volunteerism has individual, regional, religious, political and ideological goals.

I’d submit myself to a draft, as we share a duty to defend ourselves, but I would not do the same for a mandatory civil service that is not defense related. And to be sure, I do not have the same civil service interests our president has.

For instance, part of the bill’s express purpose is to, “strengthen the social fabric of the nation and overcome civic challenges by bringing together people from diverse economic, ethnic and educational backgrounds.”

I’m not sure how this will overcome civic challenges, but it seems that mandatory service is purportedly a large social experiment in forced diversity. I have no problem with valuing diversity, but I am baffled that it has even come under the potential scope of federal government oversight.

Which is why even the expansion of federal service programs like AmeriCorps is a waste of money.

The bill is entirely consistent with President Barack Obama’s budget plan to cap deductions people can take on charitable giving. Reducing deductions means increasing the percentage of tax dollars that get to be spent directly by the federal government.

What this really means is that the president believes the government knows how to create charitable programs better than private charities—the ones you give to, be it International Children’s Fund, Portland Rescue Mission, etc. It doesn’t matter; the government will do the spending now.

And that is what is at the heart of AmeriCorps—government control of volunteerism—and with it, government waste.

Take VISTA, for example—President John F. Kennedy’s brainchild and Andrew Johnson’s handiwork in the “War on Poverty” that never actually lowered poverty rates, despite huge overall spending.

Where does federal VISTA money go? If you work … oh sorry … volunteer for them for a year, you get a living allowance and health care in addition to $4,725 toward college. Even if volunteers genuinely benefit those they serve, it sure costs a lot to do it.

As James Bovard writes in the April 2009 issue of the American Conservative, “Rather than financial martyrdom, signing up for AmeriCorps is, for many, akin to a paid internship.”

And just below the provision to investigate mandatory service is another to learn about “the need for a public service academy, a four-year institution that offers a federally funded undergraduate education with a focus on training future public sector leaders.”

Because we just don’t have enough people working for the government—and count these people out from ever working in the private sector—that’s not what they went to college for!

Proponents of the GIVE Act might argue that now more than ever it is necessary to encourage volunteerism. But AmeriCorps is not pure volunteerism, and it is not the most successful form of charity—despite claims it would encourage private donation.

John P. Walters of Stanford University’s Hoover Institute, in the January 1996 issue of Policy Review, writes that in the first year of AmeriCorps, “only 12 percent of AmeriCorps’ funds came from nongovernmental sources. The program’s supposed ability to ‘leverage’ private funds did not exist.”

Even worse, “despite nearly $9 trillion in total welfare spending since Lyndon Johnson declared War on Poverty in 1964, the poverty rate is perilously close to where it was when we began, more than 40 years ago,” writes Michael D. Tanner of the CATO institute.

More volunteering is a fine thing, even with AmeriCorps—and it is arguably more necessary now, but not through the federal government. You know better than bureaucrats how to spend your money and volunteer hours.