Voluntarism and self-governance
The American Interest has a fascinating cover story in their January/February 2008 edition that gets at the heart of the democratic principles at stake during this political period.
A Call to National Service
The emphasis in this article on voluntary service and self-governance is encouraging during a period of romanticism of top-down and coercive governance. It both embodies DeToqueville's celebration of American democracy as a land of citizens who solved problems without government oversight or prompting and is the basis for much of what has always made American democracy special - in its capacity to inspire Americans to do for themselves and for one another - in a world where monarchs and empires were too often driven by the narrow and often self-centered ambitions of powerful leaders and those with power.
If you have not read Alexis DeToqueville's Democracy in America, I highly recommend this Frenchman's descriptions from his experience trekking across the American landscape providing a first-hand account of the new American democracy in the 19th century and its unique capacity for self-governance and voluntary citizen efforts. Carl Kastle's Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780-1860 is an excellent history of this very spirit among committed citizen in the creation of common schools that are the antecedent to our contemporary public schools and the commitment to education for all children that they embody in America.
This commitment to voluntary citizen efforts being the backbone of American democracy and the American economy are the fundamental strengths in American society and the source of the most sustainable strength in liberal democracies outside of official government responsibilities - national defense and law enforcement, most notably - that only government can exercise authority over (though for both of which voluntary efforts are also required and function most effectively the more citizens are freely responsible for the underlying duties involved).
So a focus on voluntarism and self-governance, during a period of illusions about the power of coercion and top-down governance to solve more problems than either actually can solve is a welcome contribution to the public discussion.
I am ambivalent about the authors' proposal for a National Service American Dream Account, not because I do not believe in its purposes, but because it seems to have serious tension with the underlying strengths of this commitment - that it is self-governing and voluntary rather than goverment taxed and run - and that it seems to be a strange proposal at a time when it is clear that the the Federal budget is very much in the red.
This is the bottom-line on such proposals. I like the idea, generally. If Americans want such an idea, they need to be prepared to pay for it and not bitch about the taxes involved. I think such efforts are better and more sustainably funded and have more integrity to their missions if they are in the private and non-profit sector. But if people want to pay for such an idea through government, so be it, as long as they are willing to pay for it and as long as they are willing to cut government programs that need cutting to balance the budget and end this remarkably foolish policy of servicing the national debt at a rate of more than $400 million for more than $9 trillion dollars of debt.
This is the inherent weakness of having the Federal or even state or local governments be responsible for such efforts rather than having them be genuinely voluntary and self-governing - meaning citizen founded and run. The authors' cite the KIPP Academy as an example of the spirit they would like to encourage, missing the irony, I suppose, that the KIPP Academy, a series of charter schools to help disadvantaged youth, was started explicitly to get out from under government bureaucracy and mandates that had often been counterproductive in regular public schools. Genuinely voluntary efforts - non-profit groups like KIPP or the Red Cross or the United Way, for instance - offer a more sustainable path to more flexible and effective efforts, more room for experimentation and diversity of purpose, activities, and ideas, and more sustainable funding for such efforts that do not require the drama of national and state political fights that generally serve to polarize support for otherwise good and decent programs.
But if people want to adopt such a program, I just suggest that they do so and make peace with the taxes that are involved with funding such efforts and give the administrators plenty of room to handle such programs as they see fit rather than perpetually polarizing such efforts with ideological disputes that often undermine their purposes.
You may note a touch of skepticism on my part that such programs will actually be able to do this while being government run and funded, which is more than reasonable given our history, I think. Because too typically the noble intentions of such programs get drug into the mud of polarized and endless ideological sniping which often undermines decent efforts. When groups like KIPP raise money for their own efforts and they are responsible for its administration, there is often less room for sniping and polarized political efforts to undermine their operations. Not so for publicly funded and operated programs, sadly. Though it would be nice if were not so.
It also would be nice if Americans would reconcile what they want to spend on government programs with what money they are actually willing to spend so the Federal Government does not end up being saddled with almost half-a-trillion dollars in interest on such debt - outside of the over 9 trillion dollars in debt that the U.S. Federal government carries - in order to live beyond our means.
It is a perpetually dysfunctional cycle we have in our politicization of government efforts like this one and our capacity to pay for them, which I think is bogged down in the inherent problems of a budget that noone feels final responsibility for, programs that inevitably get loaded down with ideological baggage, and the coercion inherent in taxation. But if we can somehow escape that tendency with a program like this, it, like the G.I. Bill, might be a worthy effort.
I would like to see us find some resolution around these more fundamental issues, which I'm fairly convinced will only happen the more we transition such efforts into the genuinely voluntary and civil sector, for-profit and non-profit. But absent that, have at it, I suppose. Maybe we can still do some good with a model of governance that will only get better the more we genuinely make peace with the commitments we make. I don't think the fundamental issues will be resolved until we start making a transition of such programs to the private and non-profit sectors and show the willingness necessary to cut the Federal budget to sustainable levels that also free up the economy to do the magic we need it to do to support growth and jobs.
The bottom line is that we need to be more responsible on our choices around such issues. This will happen better the more such efforts are genuinely voluntary in the civil sector rather than government-run, I am convinced. And, worst of all, our current budget and government commitments are a terrible example to the American public for the kind of fiscal self-discipline that they need in their own lives to save, invest, and grow sustainable nest eggs for their own lives and which is the larger and more important solution to many of our more serious budget issues, like Social Security and Medicare, which, ironically, were both started with the same purpose in mind. As always, I am open to being wrong on such issues. But it seems to me that we need to be focussed on helping Americans to learn the kind of fiscal self-discipline that the Federal budget is the poorest possible example for if many of the issues we care about are going to be funded and if those working such programs are to have finances over the course of their lifetimes and in their retirements that will support them. This kind of proposal makes that harder, I think, rather than easier.
