A Culture of Subservience - a libertarian rebuttal to John Bridgeland's “Building a Culture of Service”
A Culture of Subservience
by Scott McPherson, July 23, 2004
In a December 2 op-ed in the Washington Times, “Building a Culture of Service,” John M. Bridgeland, president and director of USA Freedom Corps, wrote, “President Bush sought to foster a culture of service, citizenship, and responsibility” following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and, to that end, created the Freedom Corps. He then “asked every American to give at least two years of their lives in service to others.”
“Looking at how Americans are responding,” Bridgeland continued, “there are strong signs of hope. Within two years of the president’s call to service, the new Citizen Corps is mobilizing Americans nationwide.... Americans are signing up in droves to become an even greater nation of joiners and givers,” including doctors, nurses, neighborhood-watch committees, volunteer police officers, wildfire fighters, and hurricane response groups.
“It is this selfless service to others,” Bridgeland concludes, “that makes us unique in the world and connects us to what it really means to be an American.”
The trouble, however, is that this “culture of service” so praised by a government bureaucrat should give us far more reason to reflect than to celebrate.
America was not founded on the idea of “selfless service to others” as our highest ethical achievement. Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence to declare to the world that “all Men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” and “that to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted.” In other words, individuals have moral rights that preexist government, government exists to protect those rights, and people have a moral responsibility to respect the rights of others.
Modern libertarians have best explained this relationship as one in which every person is to be left free to pursue his own happiness, with government on hand to guard us from those who might defraud us or cause us physical harm.
Under this framework, people saw themselves as autonomous individuals with a moral endowment to proceed peacefully in the quest for their own personal fulfillment. This could be, and was, achieved in any number and combination of ways: commerce, religion, charity, artistic expression, family, industry, chastity, prudence, entrepreneurship, investment — all were seen as paths to personal enrichment and the creation of a richer, kinder, more peaceful nation.
What made us “unique in the world,” then — what it really meant to be an American — was that, for the first time in history, a group of people had constructed a government which, for the most part, was morally as well as legally restricted from interfering with the peaceful actions of the citizenry. Americans saw government essentially as the means to just one end: keeping the peace.
