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Tuesday, December 02, 2008
Thomas Sowell :: Townhall.com Columnist
Freedom and the Left
by Thomas Sowell
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Most people on the left are not opposed to freedom. They are just in favor of all sorts of things that are incompatible with freedom.

Freedom ultimately means the right of other people to do things that you do not approve of. Nazis were free to be Nazis under Hitler. It is only when you are able to do things that other people don't approve that you are free.

One of the most innocent-sounding examples of the left's many impositions of its vision on others is the widespread requirement by schools and by college admissions committees that students do "community service."

There are high schools across the country from which you cannot graduate, and colleges where your application for admission will not be accepted, unless you have engaged in activities arbitrarily defined as "community service."

The arrogance of commandeering young people's time, instead of leaving them and their parents free to decide for themselves how to use that time, is exceeded only by the arrogance of imposing your own notions as to what is or is not a service to the community.

Working in a homeless shelter is widely regarded as "community service"-- as if aiding and abetting vagrancy is necessarily a service, rather than a disservice, to the community.

Is a community better off with more people not working, hanging out on the streets, aggressively panhandling people on the sidewalks, urinating in the street, leaving narcotics needles in the parks where children play?

This is just one of the ways in which handing out various kinds of benefits to people who have not worked for them breaks the connection between productivity and reward, as far as they are concerned.

But that connection remains as unbreakable as ever for society as a whole. You can make anything an "entitlement" for individuals and groups but nothing is an entitlement for society as a whole, not even food or shelter, both of which have to be produced by somebody's work or they will not exist.

What "entitlements" for some people mean is forcing other people to work for their benefit. As a bumper sticker put it: "Work harder. Millions of people on welfare are depending on you."

The most fundamental problem, however, is not which particular activities students are required to engage in under the title of "community service." Continued...
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About The Author
Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute and author of The Housing Boom and Bust.
 
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Reply # 1
Date: Jan 29, 2009 - 9:31 PM EST
Freedom and the Left, by Lee
Sir, You should spend some time reading Karl R. Popper's 'The Open Society and Its Enemies, Part 1, The spell of Plato.' Popper properly defines Individualism as opposed to Collectivism and selfishness as opposed to altruism. Popper states that Plato has caused much philosophical confusion down through the ages by saying that individualism is equivalent to selfishness. I am so sad for you and those like you who don't properly understand the world as it is, rather than the world as they wished it were. Answer this: If individualists are selfish, why do their donations to charity far outweigh the miserable donations of the so called Liberals? Huh?
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Reply # 2
Date: Jan 5, 2009 - 9:11 AM EST
A Misguided Rant on Freedom
The entirety of Mr. Sowell’s editorial is filled with rhetorical sleights of hand and misapplied ipso facto logic.

To begin, Mr. Sowell claims that requiring students, in high school or college, to perform community service is somehow abridging their basic freedoms.

Mr Sowell goes on to claim that some mysterious group of “people on the left” …are systematically in favor of things that are incompatible with freedom” and, are therefore, bigots. Missing in all of his histrionics is any proof that community service requirements are solely the province of left-leaning activists in Blue-state America or why this has anything to do with bigotry.

Mr. Sowell also complains, with no shread of evidence, that “the left” has arbitrarily imposed a definition of what can and cannot be considered community service.

Even beyond these illogical arguments, Mr. Sowell veers off into another rant that, among other things, equates working in a homeless shelter to aiding and abetting vagrancy and that welfare and other entitlement programs are the proximate cause of ”..people not working, hanging out in the streets, aggressively panhandling people on sidewalks, urinating on the street, and leaving narcotics needles in the parks where children play.”

So let’s have some fun and connect the dots of Mr. Sowell’s argument. There exists a group of left-leaning activists, unknowingly bigoted in their actions, who are arbitrarily defining which activities can be considered as community service and that these very services performed by students are causing people to not work, urinate in the streets, and leave their narcotic needles near to playing children. As absurd as the above sounds, this is exactly the assertion of Mr. Sowell’s editorial.

The extent to which Mr. Sowell tortures logic in making his editorial points shows the difficulty he had in trying to paint something inherently good in such a bad light.

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