Matt Yglesias discusses Sen. Chris Dodd's national service plan, and in doing so touches on something that often arises in church regarding the practice of mission trips.
Here's Matt:
There's nothing wrong, generically, with such programs but they really need to be looked at one-by-one on the merits primarily through the lens of whether or not they're cost-effective methods of achieving the public purpose in question. Does appropriating more money to the Peace Corps make sense as a development strategy, or would it be better to boost funding for the Millenium Challenge Corporation or the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria.
The question he raises is often asked of church mission trips. A local church youth group raises money for a weeklong trip to, say, Haiti, where they will be helping to build a school. This works OK. The school gets built. But it may not be the most cost-effective approach. A significant chunk of the funds raised winds up going to the group's travel expenses, all so a bunch of kids with little or no construction experience can travel thousands of miles to help out. If the goal is to get the school built, it would seem to make more sense to raise the money and let the folks down in Haiti use it to hire local skilled laborers — people who are already there, who know what they're doing and who may desperately need the paycheck.
But the point of these mission trips is not only to get the school built. That's part of it, but it's not the only goal. The mission trip is also designed to give the American youth group a tangible, visceral stake in the fate of the Haitian community. This is vital for the people in Haiti too. The problem with the calculus above is that it presumes that the total level of contribution is a constant. That assumption is probably not true. It's unlikely that the youth group, the church, or any other given community here would raise the same amount of money without the personal stake of the trip itself.
The purpose of the mission trip is not exclusively to change the Haitian community where the school is to be built. Part of the purpose of the trip is also to change the young Americans who are going there, and to change the community that sends them. Part of the reason for such trips is to nurture a sense of empathy, of solidarity, and an ethos of service — to create and maintain the capacity to care whether or not children in Haiti have a decent place to go to school, and to create and maintain the desire to help.
This should also be a part of what Matt refers to as the "public purpose" of any kind of national service program. This additional purpose is what separates things like the Peace Corps or AmeriCorps from other more professional and specialized development efforts. The service corps may not be as efficient as a more professionalized "development strategy," but they exist to promote and achieve additional goals that the development strategy does not address. They exist, in part, to ensure that our national character remains capable of supporting those other, more targeted and efficient, development efforts.
Having said all of that, I'm not persuaded that a big federal program like Dodd's proposed "American Community Initiative" makes sense. What Matt calls Dodd's "conceptual confusions" could be clarified with a better understanding of subsidiarity* (or, for you Kuyperians out there, "sphere sovereignty"). Programs like the Peace Corps and AmeriCorps have symbolic importance. Among other things, they help to ensure that bully-pulpit praise for volunteerism isn't completely hollow.
But the heavy lifting here will not and cannot be done by the federal government. It will be done, rather, by those closer to the ground: by families, schools, churches (synagogues/mosques/temples/covens/Hitchens Book Clubs), civic organizations, business, labor and media (old and new).
If all of these other actors play their part, then service will be a vital part of our national character regardless of what the federal government does or does not do. If all of these other actors fail to play their part, then anything the federal government attempts will be as ineffective and dim as a thousand points of light.
I like the parts of Dodd's plan that focus on creating incentives for service, and even more so the parts that focus on removing disincentives. (Apart from his proposed massive expansion of AmeriCorps, however, he seems to offer little to address what may be the largest single disincentive — educational debt.)
I'm still not completely sure what to think about Dodd's idea of mandatory service as a requirement for high school graduation. I get the impulse — a self-absorbed little prick really shouldn't be handed a diploma and declared "educated" until someone has pointed out to him that he shouldn't be such a self-absorbed little prick. And the idea of mandatory service for high school students begins to look more attractive the more you listen to the whining of its most vocal opponents. Yet for all of that "mandatory service" still seems like an oxymoron. Berea College provides an inspiring model for service and education, but students can choose whether or not to attend there. High school students don't have a choice. I'd like to see high school students encouraged to serve. I'd like to see them empowered to serve without suffering any opportunity costs. And I'd like to see their service rewarded. But, unlike Dodd, I don't think I'd like to see their service required.
This is where I'd like to conclude with a paragraph tying together all the disparate half-thoughts above into some coherent whole, but for the life of me I can't figure out what such a paragraph would say.
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* For a primer on subsidiarity, see "Who is you?."
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