Kudos to Greg
Mankiw for catching this from the President-Elect's transition website:
The Obama Administration will call on Americans to serve in
order to meet the nation's challenges. President-Elect Obama
will expand national service programs like AmeriCorps and Peace
Corps and will create a new Classroom Corps to help teachers in
underserved schools, as well as a new Health Corps, Clean
Energy Corps, and Veterans Corps. Obama will call on citizens
of all ages to serve America, by developing a plan to
require 50 hours of community service in middle school
and high school and 100 hours of community service in college
every year. Obama will encourage retiring Americans to
serve by improving programs available for individuals over age
55, while at the same time promoting youth programs such as
Youth Build and Head Start. [Italics mine]
Mankiw correctly identifies this for what it is:
conscription. Putting children in the service of the
government in order to teach them the virtue of sacrifice to the
collective: is it just because I'm listening to Penderecki's
Threnody that I find this incredibly creepy?
UPDATE: Within a few hours of Mankiw pointing this out, Obama's
website has changed the language from to require to
setting a goal. If that demonstrates anything, it's that
Obama's rhetoric does not reflect his intent unless, like Mankiw
or Joe the Plumber, you can catch him in a rare mistake.
