In a hideously underpublicized clause of Barack Obama’s plans for his first term, one I wasn’t even aware of until yesterday, there is word of a mandatory service initiative, a “calling on” of all American citizens to donate a certain amount of time per year to community projects. Every middle and high school student will be required to do 50 hours, and every college student will be required to do 100 hours per year of enrollment. Retiring citizens, age 55 and over, will be “encouraged” to serve in programs appropriate for their age group, and all other citizens will be pushed to join one of the many programs Obama wants to either grow or start up, namely the Peace Corps, Health Corps, Clean Energy Corps, Veteran Corps, Head Start, and Youth Build.

Note that I am not anti-community service. I have done a decent share of it throughout my life, starting with making layettes in my dad’s Crisis Pregnancy Center office to participating in Walk for Life to giving 17 inches of my hair to Locks of Love to tutoring, and I don’t plan on being an stingy, uncharitable adult in the years between now and my death. Charity is good. Community service is good. People should do it.

But requirement? Not only does this completely contradict the very heart of charity, it is borderline slavery. The government cannot control our time and our good deeds. We are not indentured by our citizenship. If a legal adult does not want to do community service, that’s a legitimate choice. It is none of anyone else’s business. We’re being treated like criminals, but instead of a court-ordered service to compensate for a misdemeanor, it’s a government mandate to further a socialist, false utopian agenda.

Did I mention the bribery involved? Obama is offering a $4,000 tax credit to be applied directly to a college student’s tuition should he or she complete the 100 annual hours of community service (overall, $1,000 per year for the average student). This promise 1) negates the term “charity” and 2) forces American taxpayers to shove out payment for work that would have otherwise been done by true volunteers at no cost. Even as a college student who could certainly use an extra 4k in my UNC account, I think this idea is ludicrous and backwards.

While change.gov has made some slight alterations to the careful wording of the “Service” paragraph, eliminating the word “require” that appeared frequently in the first published draft, the principle is the same, as is the underlying problem: we are being turned into the government’s slaves.

Time to re-excavate the Underground Railroad, huh?