Before the election, I wrote elsewhere about Obama's creepy "call to service".

Public schools will have their funding cut unless they force their students to perform 50 hours of service a year. Since for most people, public school is the only choice they've got, this amounts to a mandatory service program for every child in a public school in the country.

Well, it appears that this wasn't just standard electioneering pablum, because Obama's new website expounds on his plan "to require 50 hours of community service in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in college every year." This program is disturbing, representing a new government intrusion into private life cloaked in the patriotic rhetoric of "serving America," and a crowding out of private enterprise by government-created programs using forced labor. So it would seem that the nation's first black president wants us to work for free.

EDIT: I note with interest that the wording of the website has been changed, no doubt because of the spate of blogs talking about it. (Change...our position on the issues!) The original full text will be posted below. Nevertheless, the amendment is still troubling.

Grants contingent on community service, while still a matter of government taking money from taxpayers to entice others to do things, is an easier sell. But as I argued before, this program will offer $40/hour wages, enticing students away from good resume-building activities to government make-work jobs, and the proposal may well lead to tuition inflation based on simple supply and demand. (Note that in this case the rich will be better able to afford lower-paying but better resume-building internships - a way for Democrats to play to their Upper West Side faction.)

And for secondary school the ploy will be even more coercive. He talks about "setting a goal" to force kids to volunteer. But how will that be accomplished? By the only means that the federal government has - public schools will have their funding cut unless they force their students to perform 50 hours of service a year.

APPENDIX: The original note was changed to its current stage without fanfare, retraction, or acknowledgment. Now politicians do this all the time, so it's not much of a criticism of the Obama administration to point this out. It is, however, a small rebuke to those who believed that his election would somehow lead to a quantum leap in political transparency and integrity. The original Obama blurb, before they were called on it and cloaked it in nicer sounding language:

"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."