Positive Liberty

Virginia, apparently affiliated with ServiceNation, writes in defense of her group’s activities:

Managing, training and maintaining volunteers takes a lot of work especially for non-profit organizations. Often an organization who needs or benefits from the efforts of volunteers such as some public schools or parks, do not have the labor to recruit, train, organize and coordinate volunteers leaving volunteers and those in the organization feeling frusterated. [sic] We all know people and at times we too want to help out and want to do good but it takes coordination to put us into a position that fits our strengths and gifts and contributes to the work of the organization. This is a vital piece that an coordinating [sic] organization provides.

Also, it can add to the experience of a volunteer to be connected with other volunteers while they are volunteerin. [sic]

Having served in the Peace Corps I know that this transformational experience would have been very difficult without a coordinating body to recruit, train, and connect me with the locals and my peers. I would not have done it and 20 years since my time in Peace Corps service, I am grateful every day for it. I bring the lessons I learned and the knowing I shared of myself and my culture to the Hondurans to my home, my work and my community. We are all richer for that.

All of this may well be true, but two standard caveats about market failure still apply.

Here’s the first: Observing that a given good or service is scarce, and perhaps scarcer than you’d like it to be, does not in itself indicate a market failure. On some level, all goods and services are scarce.

It remains to be shown that “coordination of volunteer activities” is a service facing a particular kind of scarcity — it’s a public good, it has positive externalities, or the like. This is perhaps arguable, but it’s not argued here. It’s just asserted. Let’s see how well that assertion holds up.

For starters, the Google string “volunteer Bowie Maryland” yields 49,200 pages. Even “-fire,” to get rid of pages about the fire department, still turns up 26,600. Many of these are job placement agencies, suggesting that the market is coordinating the volunteer process extraordinarily well in my home town. (Population of Bowie, Maryland: 50,000.)

It’s not like Google is the be-all and end-all of research, either. It’s just scratching the surface. Here’s the 2005 annual report from the county parks service:

* The Department recruited, placed and trained over 19,000 volunteers including teens, adults and groups. Over 198,000 hours of service was donated. The value of these volunteer contributions is over 3 million dollars (see table below)
* Over 1400 teens received their required service learning hours which is a criteria needed to graduate from a Maryland public high school (see table below)
* Five adult volunteers, 1 teen volunteer and one volunteer group were honored as 2005 Prince George’s County “Volunteer of the Year” recipients
* 2005 Volunteer Appreciation Night was planned and implemented by the Volunteer Committee. Over five hundred adult volunteers and their guests attended the event held at the Prince George’s Stadium, home of the Bowie Baysox to celebrate National Volunteer Week
* The Volunteer Committee also planned and implemented the 2004 “Make a Difference Day”, a national day of “doing good”. The Points of Light and USA Weekend Magazine sponsored this program. Program was held on October 23, 2004. Over 1000 volunteers and staff participated in this event. The Department received an honorable mention for outstanding service and was featured in Weekend Magazine April 15-17, 2005 edition
* Twenty staff have been working diligently to develop the new Partners ‘n Parks park adoption program which will be implemented in the of Fall 2005
* In addition to year round volunteer opportunities, the VSO assisted staff in the recruitment and placement of over 1700 volunteers at special events throughout the county including the Annual Summer Playground Carnival, Hispanic Festival, Kinderfest, Festival of Lights, Waterfront cleanups, community festivals and fairs, sporting events and more.
* AARP National Service Day was held on May 12, 2005. Over 130 volunteers donated 780 hours of service to our park system
* The University of Maryland, College Park Scholars Program Service Day was held on August 28, 2004.Over 400 volunteers donated 2430 hours of service To our park system

To me, these look like some fairly extensive volunteer coordination activities. Yes, yes, it’s a government agency. But it’s almost certainly better done locally than federally. If the local government is already doing this, and doing it well, then there’s no need to federalize, is there? And if the local government is doing it badly — that is, if this really does represent a “failure,” then it’s certainly not a market failure, and it’s still not clear how the federal government can help. Federalized Volunteer Appreciation Night? Federalized Kinderfest?

One could always say “not enough,” I suppose, and declare a failure by fiat. But what we’re seeing is certainly not zero volunteer coordination activity, and if there’s a “market” failure here, I don’t see evidence either way.

Getting back to my Google search, I don’t see many churches in the first few pages, but I’m sure that if I were to call a few in the neighborhood, they would be happy to ask me what I’m good at and then place me appropriately. I recall from my youth as an observant Catholic that our church had many different volunteer programs, commonly with training, placement, opportunities for volunteer feedback, signs of appreciation. . . and a lot of the same things I’m seeing from the local parks.

It’s far from clear that, short of a ServiceNation-style initiative, my volunteer experience will be in a badly fitting post, isolated from friends, community, or networking opportunities. Why do so many people claim that the state is what makes people friends with one another? And why do so many people believe it?

And now for the second caveat about market failures: Once we’re sure we have a market failure — and these things are rarer than most people imagine, and possibly not operative here — we must still establish that the state is the only actor able to correct the failure, and that any failures it commits along the way will not be worse than the failures already being committed. The vague and shifting goals of ServiceNation, and the totalitarianism of the Rangel proposal, don’t leave me too optimistic on either count.

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