It looks obvious

This is a very good post, on the issue that become more worrisome this election:

Which brings us to a wider point, which is that I do not like the idea of service to the nation or to the community being equivocated with service to the government or through the government. Putting aside the specifics of which services will count, I don’t want the State adjudicating what helps society in general. I don’t need Fearless Leader directing brigades of Citizen Junior Workers to enact his Grand Vision. The State already spends enough of my money telling me that they know better than I do how I should be spending the rest of my money and my time. I don’t want to put great swaths of extra time at their disposal to start deciding what should be done with it. The less labor, and fruits of labor, central planners have to work with, the better.

Finally, I can’t help but think these plans also feed off the perniciousness of the same anti-profit sentiments discussed by Roberts and Munger on this week’s EconTalk. There’s a common disposition in a large swaths of society that making a profit on something is greedy, conducting commerce is crass and that if you’re making money then someone, somewhere, must be loosing money. This Bobo, zero-sum, anti-Protestant-work-ethic is the second pillar of this drive for national servitude, along with the aforementioned ageism. Put politely, this view is fallacious. Put more directly, I have seen more cogent points of view encapsulated in the Tupperware containers that have been pushed to the back of my fridge and left to fester for weeks.

When I think about the issue of compulsory volunteering, as the writer of post nicely called it, boil down to the question of who we are putting in the center: the collective or the individual. The questions of efficiency, although conveniently serving my point, are less important to me. In other words, even if the observations will suggest that subjecting the individual to the needs of the collective generate better economical results for the collective, I would still be against it. However both, the efficiency and the moral question, tend to generate the same answer - enslaving people is wrong morally and is bad practice.

(Via Cafe Hayek) 

How do one reconcile between the concept of “The Pursuit of Happiness” as a fundamental human right and this:

“That’s what history calls us to do, because loving your country shouldn’t just mean watching fireworks on the Fourth of July. Loving your country must mean accepting your responsibility to do your part to change it.”

“There is a lesson to be learned from generations who have served: from soldiers and sailors, airmen and Marines, suffragists and freedom riders, teachers and doctors, cops and firefighters,” he said. “It’s the lesson that in America, each of us is free to seek our own dreams, but we must also serve a common purpose, a higher purpose.”

Apparently by saying one thing and its exact opposite in the same sentence….

The real sad thing with Both Obama and McCain subjecting us to serve at the pleasure of the collective is that it doesn’t make any real noise. The idea that individuals will be coerced to serve, and not volunteer to serve if the want, should have drive us to revolt in protests - but it doesn’t.