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The president-elect already has said he'll have a five-day online comment period before signing any nonemergency legislation, so Americans can be part of the process.

The allowed comments on pending nonemergency bills? I dunno. Seems like a placebo to me; and if not, it seems like a terrible idea in most cases.

What a great @#%^ing idea. Get the college students involved in their community and ease the cost of education, all while building character. I'd heard about the high school community service idea before, but this is the first I've seen of the college plan.

Problem number one with grand schemes for universal voluntary public service is that they can't be both universal and voluntary. If everybody has to do it, then it's not voluntary, is it? And if it's truly up to the individual, then it won't be universal. What advocates of this sort of thing generally have in mind is using the pressures of social conformity and the powers of the state indirectly to remove as much freedom of choice as possible, while still being able to claim that everyone who signs up is a "volunteer."

More specifically, these plans aim to achieve near-universality with a couple of incentives. One is a general ethic of "volunteerism," enforced by peer pressure, corporate public service advertising campaigns, earnest reports from blue-ribbon commissions, speeches from politicians, covers of newsmagazines, goody-goody student-council types who infect every college campus, Oprah, Larry King, and so on. America is very good at marshalling all the forces of ******** in our society toward a noble end, like stopping cruelty to animals or hounding sexual predators. Pressuring young people to "serve" for a year or two is a perfect subject for one of these campaigns.

A second incentive is to make college loans contingent on a year of service, or some such formula. That would snare all but the richest young folks. The hope would be that some fraction of those so ensnared will be inspired to dedicate their lives — or at least a part of their lives — to public service. And it's possible. But a larger fraction may regard the whole exercise somewhat cynically, and the very concept of "volunteerism" under this kind of pressure may turn the word into a joke. The exclusion of kids whose parents are wealthy enough to buy their way out — as young men could buy their way out of the Civil War — will do nothing to reduce such cynicism. And young people may ask why, for example, farmers are not required to "volunteer" for a year or two in exchange for the massive subsidies they enjoy. Or what about boomers like the editor of TIME, when they start collecting Social Security and Medicare in a few years? Why should they escape the maw of mandatory volunteerism?

As it happens, we already have a system for inducing truly voluntary activities that benefit the public. It's called free-market capitalism. It works this way: if you need something done, you offer enough money to induce someone to do it. There is no need for inspiration or other malarkey. In fact, the voluntary nature of transactions under capitalism is what gives our economic system its moral authority. And if the need that has to be satisfied is social — if satisfying it would benefit everybody or the worst-off among us who need help — we have another well established system called taxation. It works this way: through democratic processes, we decide as a society that something is worth doing or someone is worth helping. Then we tax ourselves in order to buy this service from someone who wishes to sell it for the amount we are willing to pay.

On a whim, I checked out what's on http://www.president.com

I'm more interested in the early buzz about killing Bush's executive order against federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research, closing Gitmo and passing the expanded SCHIP program (which passed Congress but was vetoed by Bush).

The Obama Administration will call on Americans to serve in order to meet the nation’s challenges. President-Elect Obama will expand national service programs like AmeriCorps and Peace Corps and will create a new Classroom Corps to help teachers in underserved schools, as well as a new Health Corps, Clean Energy Corps, and Veterans Corps. Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by developing a plan to require 50 hours of community service in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in college every year. Obama will encourage retiring Americans to serve by improving programs available for individuals over age 55, while at the same time promoting youth programs such as Youth Build and Head Start.

You're going to be ok at the first broken promise or outright lie, right?

It'll have about 10% of the impact on raising national consciousness about legislation that CSPAN does. Your politicians will likely read it aloud and laugh.