That’s Barack Obama’s position:

The most worrisome of Barack Obama’s proposals is his goal of bringing most charities under the federal umbrella in part by inducing all middle and high school children to do 50 hours of community service every year. …

By requiring almost all public middle schoolers, starting at the age of 10 or 11, to join his new cadres of community service workers and become part of his “civilian national security force,” Barack Obama shows himself to be out of touch with American traditions of individual volunteerism.

The “community service” fetish among lefties really took off in the early ’90s. But actual community service, of the kind that had been going on for a century, wasn’t good enough. I’m talking about the community service required of members of the Boy Scouts of America.

Many schools, including those in Durham, that began requiring a minimum number of community service hours decided that the hundreds of hours that Boy Scouts donate annually could not be used to satisfy this requirement. That included massive Boy Scout Eagle Projects, which put to shame the hand-holding and face-painting that lefties like to think constitutes community service.

MORE: Jim Lindgren of The Volokh Conspiracy gets it right:

Mandatory community service sucks in much that is private and diverse and spits out an excessively homogenized version of the good, a version that would come with a government seal of approval.

It’s probably not an accident that many American groups who tend to favor greater government largesse are relatively stingy in their own donations to charity.