Obama Wants You

Obama Wants You

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Thursday, July 31, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Election '08: Barack Obama calls it "Universal Voluntary Public Service." We call it a plan for national involuntary servitude. Kennedy asked us what we could do for our country. Obama has ways to make us volunteer.

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IBD Series: The Audacity Of Socialism

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Sen. Obama's call to public service is quite different from JFK's. JFK knew America was already a nation of givers and volunteers, perhaps the most charitable and altruistic nation on Earth. Entities such as the Peace Corps would give Americans an outlet for their kindness and generosity, an opportunity to share what the freest nation on Earth had given them. Obama will force you to share.

Obama's Orwellian use of the words "universal" and "voluntary" together is an indicator of an antithesis to capitalist society deeply rooted in his socialist associations, education and training. Indeed, in 1996, when he ran for an Illinois state Senate seat, one of his first endorsements was from the Chicago branch of the Democratic Socialists of America.

On the surface, his plan looks just like typical bureaucratic program growth. He wants to expand Americorps to 250,000 slots and double the size of the Peace Corps. He'll create a Clean Energy Corps to plant trees and otherwise save the Earth. It's how Obama plans to fill those slots that's worrisome.

Announcing his plan July 2 at the University of Colorado, he said: "We will ask Americans to serve. We will create new opportunities to serve. And we will direct that service to our most pressing national challenges." He will make us an offer we can't refuse.

Obama says that as president he 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." What he doesn't say is that he'll make such voluntarism compulsory by attaching strings to federal education dollars. The schools will make the kids volunteer. It's called plausible deniability.

In a commencement speech at Wesleyan University, Obama advised graduates not to pursue the American dream of success, but to serve others.

"You can take your diploma, walk off this stage and chase only after the big house and the nice suits and all the other things that our money culture says you should," he told the graduates. "But I hope you don't."

Don't be another Bill Gates and amass a fortune making people more productive and successful in their daily lives and giving your countrymen a standard of living the world will envy. Exchange your cap and gown for sackcloth and ashes. Leave your possessions behind and come and follow Obama.

"Fulfilling your immediate wants and needs betrays a poverty of ambition," he opined. Shame on us for being selfish and buying that SUV built by an autoworker trying to fulfill his family's immediate wants and needs.

"Our collective service can shape the destiny of this generation," Obama said. "Individual salvation depends on collective salvation."

We already have a Salvation Army that is truly a volunteer organization. Collective service and salvation is not a classic definition of voluntarism. What Obama has in mind is to turn America into a socialist version of the old Soviet collectives.

And if your idea of service is to join the military and keep others alive and free, forget about it. And never mind about ROTC on campus.

Obama has no place for those who are willing to abandon fame and fortune to lay down their lives for their friends and ours. "At a time of war," Obama says, "we need you to work for peace."

"We left corporate America, which is a lot of what we're asking young people to do," Obama's wife, Michelle, told a group of women in Zanesville, Ohio, during the primaries. "Don't go into corporate America. . . . Become teachers. Work for the community. Be social workers. Be a nurse. Those are the careers we need, and we're encouraging people to do just that."

Don't be the engineers who will figure out better ways to extract shale oil from the porous rock that holds it. Figure out how to extract more money from taxpayers' wallets.

But the Obamas are doing more than "encouraging" or "asking." In a speech in California, Michelle, who has made a small fortune in the "helping industry," said: "Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zone. . . . Barack Obama will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual — uninvolved, uninformed."

But America is not a nation of selfish, self-serving people. Social demographer Arthur Brooks once calculated that Americans volunteered 32% more than Obama's beloved Germans. We also donate seven times more money to charities and causes than the Germans who gathered in Berlin.

In talking about his national service, Obama, the man who seems to be running for "community organizer in chief," also made this startling statement:

"We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded."

This is an idea worthy of Hugo Chavez.

Northwestern University law professor James Lindgren has estimated that this civilian national security force alone would cost somewhere between $100 billion and $500 billion, or between 10% and 50% of all federal tax receipts. And that doesn't include the cost of the brown shirts.

Adults are not exempt from all this, even adults who've already served in the U.S. military. "People of all ages, stations and skills will be asked to serve," Obama says. Will they be asked, or drafted?

"The future of our nation depends on the soldier at Fort Carson," he concedes. "But it (also) depends on the teacher in East L.A., the nurse in Appalachia, the after-school worker in New Orleans . . ." So drop down and give Sgt. Obama 50 hours.

Require. Demand. Never allow. Obama's version of "voluntary" service is more appropriate for Havana than middle America. He wants to turn America's students, and even adults, into clones of Elian Gonzalez, compelled to serve the state in ways Obama "will direct."

Correction: In the first installment of this series on Tuesday, the Luo ethnic group in Kenya was identified as "communist." The father of the Luo leader cited, Oginga Odinga, did espouse the post-colonial African version of communism in the 1970s and '80s, and his son, Raila Odinga, calls himself a social democrat. But communism as an ideology did not characterize the entire tribe.