One of the many bad legacies of the Clinton administration is Americorps. Nick Gillespie as a righteous rant about the administration’s plans to expand it:

A few things regarding this piece of self-congratulatory lard every bit as bloated and morally compromised as the man for whom it is named (as it happens, Obama seemed to be confusing Teddy K with JFK, proclaiming “”I want all Americans to take up that spirit of the man for whom this bill is named; of a president who sent us to the moon; of a dreamer who always asked ‘Why not?'”).

First, public or national service is profoundly un-American as a historical concept and comes always and everywhere slathered in the stink of trench warfare and rhetorical horseshit. This is especially true when it is paid service even as those participating and spending your tax dollars luxuriate in the silky-smooth language of altruism. Which, last time I checked, was supposed to be free. Jesus rendered unto Caesar; he didn’t ask for a block grant from Pontius Pilate in return. That Obama pushes national service and voluntarism even as he works to limit tax breaks for charitable giving that drives all sorts of philanthropy is a classic screw-you, my-way-or-the-highway move.

Second, AmeriCorps is a program with a long and distinguished history of sucking even by government standards. It effectively comes in second to the standard-issue DMV bureau, with its director in 2003 dubbing it “another cumbersome, unpredictable government bureaucracy.” Yeah, yeah, they can fix all that and become squeaky clean, yadda yadda yadda, and that still doesn’t address the more basic fact that it is at best superfluous to what Americans, young and old, are already doing: Which is volunteering and “giving back” to the community up the ying-yang.

And to the extent that laws such as this confuse actual contributions to increasing living standards with getting some sort of paycheck from a non-essential government agency, they do far more damage to American ideals than we normally admit. As Julian Sanchez wrote here a few years back, “AmeriCorps boosters are less interested in the good works that serve as the program’s public justification than in the grand sense of national community it’s meant to inspire. Without AmeriCorps, after all, young people might conclude that they’re perfectly capable of giving back to their communities without either the assistance or the direction of the federal government. And wouldn’t that be a tragedy.”

A good general rule of thumb is that anything that Ted Kennedy thinks is a good idea is probably appallingly bad.