The history of the welfare state is the history of public enterprise pushing out private organization. After decades of an expanding state, most people today, irrespective of their ideological perspective, recognize that government has taken over too much of the poverty-reduction enterprise. The National Corporation, despite the best of intentions of people such as its president, Harris Wofford, risks doing the same thing to philanthropy. At some point, service to society could become widely equated with work for the government. There are already glimmerings of this problem.
Service comes in many forms, however.
Being paid by the government to shelve books in a library, whether as a formal employee or as an AmeriCorps member, is no more laudable or valuable than being paid by Crown Books to stock shelves in a bookstore. Yet government programs that equate public employment with service effectively denigrate service through private employment. This public sector bias is reflected particularly strongly in the fact that 2,800 of the first 20,000 AmeriCorps participants were assigned to federal agencies. Such activities are not likely to promote volunteerism around the country. To subscribe to the print version of Freedom Daily Click Here .