I am going to talk about community service…and why I am against it.
Today, you will see students given awards for community service. I want to explain why I disagree with that.
I think that young people can learn to be good citizens at least as well by day-dreaming, playing, socializing, or working for paying jobs at profit-making enterprises. I am tired of seeing them indoctrinated to believe that only volunteer work for no-profits qualifies as doing good.
We live in a complicated world. Many people try to simplify difficult moral issues by using the shortcut that some of us call the intention heuristic. With the intention heuristic, you say that if your intentions are good, then you are doing good, and conversely. Moreover, most people apply the intention heuristic by saying that non-profits have good intentions while profits are an indicator of bad intentions.
In fact, there are many well-intentioned people involved in profit-making enterprises. And non-profits are hardly free from venality and corruption. But leave that aside. The important point is that in a complicated world intentions do not correlate with outcomes.
If you judge people by how their life’s work contributed to better lives for people and less poverty in the world, then I will gladly stack up the Henry Fords and Thomas Edisons against the Mother Theresas. Collectively, the capitalists and entrepreneurs have a much better claim on our gratitude than do the icons of community service.
What would you rather have in your community? Would you rather have the Wal-mart that hires the workers that other businesses cannot use and for whom politicians can offer no assistance–people with little education or training, including people with disabilities? Or would you rather have the “activists” who fight to keep out Wal-Mart or who insist that they should dictate Wal-Mart’s labor policies?
In a complicated world, good intentions can have terrible consequences. One hundred years ago, many well-intentioned people championed Communism. When Lenin took power in Russia in 1917, he actually believed that the economy would organize itself, and that without profits production would be more efficient and more equitable. When both his ideas and his leadership proved unpopular, he responded with ruthless tyranny. His took his self-righteousness to a mad extreme, but I am afraid that there is a little bit of Lenin lurking among all of those who are so certain that community service is morally superior to business.
If those of you who are graduating today go on to attend a liberal arts college, you will hear constantly from people who equate moral character with political expressions of approval for non-profits and disapproval of business. They judge you not by the content of your character but by the conformity of your political expression. I urge you to reject their doctrines.
If you undertake community service, do so quietly, without righteousness. Do not celebrate community service. Do not give a special place of honor to community service. Above all, do not demean those who serve the community by helping to provide ordinary goods and services through profit-making enterprises. Their community service is honored not by wealthy donors or by doctrinaire teachers. Instead, their community service is honored by ordinary people who voluntarily choose to spend money to obtain what the profit-seekers have to offer. These willing consumers are all the evidence that is needed to show that the occupation of those in business has decent moral worth.
Nicely said.
Is there a Godwin’s law equivalent for invoking Lenin/communism?
Professor:
While I agree with the substance, I am also glad you did not speak at my high-school graduation. What a downer! You have to flip the tone to emphasize the positive more: because intention is not useful, you can do good wherever you go.
Max
Oh please. I owned an operated a successful for profit business for 35 years. In all that time, I never once had anyone suggest that fact was “an indicator of bad intentions.” Entrepreneurship and economic success are revered in this country which is perfectly OK with me.
I have also spent a lot of time volunteering with several non-profits over those years. I have seen a lot to celebrate and a lot to criticize in both worlds.
It is always remarkable to me how often the very people who are most enthusiastic about recommending the benefits of rough and tumble economic and intellectual competition scream the loudest when they are on the receiving end of real and imagined criticisms.
I would like to know the stories of your children, assuming you have them. Where did they go to college, and what were the messages that they received there?
Professor Kling
I agree that there is plenty of left wing political correctness on most college campuses. I saw it when I was in college and I’m sure they saw it when they respectively went to Penn State, UNH and the University of Delaware.
Even so, I never once heard of (either myself or from them) the idea that “only volunteer work for non-profits qualifies as doing good.” If they heard it they never mentioned it.
My daughter started her own engineering business within a few years of graduating college. One reason she started her own business was precisely because the thought she could do the most good in a private for profit business that she could control. She is in Colorado and had (as an employee at another firm) been doing things like designing outdoor heated Koi Ponds and long driveways with built in snowmelt. She is now very busy consulting on ways to be more energy efficient. I can assure you she is not bashful or apologetic about making money.
One of my sons works as an attorney in a department of state government concerned with regulating state licensed professionals. He spends most of his time telling various regulatory boards they don’t have (and shouldn’t have) the power to do the things they want to do. He is a fountain of tales of government inefficiency and plans to go into private practice within a few years.
My other son does have more stereotypically politically correct left wing views. In each case their basic political orientation was in place long before college.
Just about every community and point on the political spectrum has its own version of political correctness. And they should be called out. But not by caricaturing them beyond recognition.
Most people prefer to have their own views echoed back to them. I prefer to visit sites like this one where I am more likely to hear my own views challenged in a thoughtful and interesting way. I am more likely to comment when I think you have failed at that. I hope that doesn’t come of as disrespectful. I do find value in your blog and I liked your last book quite a bit.
That’s encouraging, I guess. That said, the University of Delaware certainly harbors other kinds of crazy:
http://www.thefire.org/cases/university-of-delaware-students-required-to-undergo-ideological-reeducation/
Jeff
Yes, just about any university you want to look at harbors many kinds of crazy and its own version of political correctness. Based on the links you provided that indoctrination attempt was rejected by students and faculty at Delaware.
Nobody likes being told what to think. Least of all college students.
It’s not like the GMU Economics Department lacks for a predictably unified point of view on the most controversial economic and political issues.
Greg, they are mainly interested in one line on your tax form.
Not consistently lambasting you holisticly isn’t necessarily a good thing.
Despite comments to the contrary, I fervently wish this speech would be given in lots of high schools today. I’m afraid the politically correct viewpoint has been handed out since I was in high school in the ’70s.
I agree with the sentiment. I might try to make the delivery as subversively non contrarian as I could stomach.
But maybe there is a role for non profits where young workers can prove their worth without hurting a firm’s profits.
Wow. Just wow. That is all.
Of course, for demagogues and ideologues, purity of political expression IS character.
Milton Friedman appeared on William F. Buckley’s Firing Line to discuss Buckley’s book Gratitude: Reflections on What We Owe to Our Country, which argued for national service. Friedman was critical. He asked Buckley something to the effect of whether cleaning out the toilet in a public school was serving the community anymore than cleaning out the toilet in a McDonald’s. I’ve been critical of community service ever since.
“I have not known much good done by those who claimed to act in the general interest.” (loose paraphrase of a sentence that follows the invisible hand passage in Wealth of Nations.)