Paid Volunteers

The B.C. government made big headlines when it decided to pay some of its bureaucrats to volunteer during the 2010 Olympic Games in Vancouver. It cost B.C. taxpayers $560,000 for the privilege of giving 376 bureaucrats the opportunity to hang out at the Olympics instead of working at their desks. However, this was nothing less than a slap in the face to the real volunteers who freely gave of their time. 

My sister was one of the volunteers who freely gave of her time. 

She says it's difficult to get people in Canada to freely volunteer and wonders why. 

To explain why people volunteer less now than in the past, I turned to Fredrick Hayek's book 'A Road To Serfdom.' He talks about what happens to traditional values in a socialist system, and this illustrates why there is less volunteerism in our society today. 

Morality flowers in an environment where: we are responsible to our own sense of right and wrong and not to the demands of someone else; we know what we should be doing and do it without being coerced; and we take responsibility for, and bear the consequences of, our decisions. 

Responsibility is exactly what the socialists of all parties promise to relieve us of. Governments today try to regiment and regulate every aspect of human action and leave nothing to chance. Relieved of personal responsibility, we have no reason to take action when we see a problem. 

The effects of this are long reaching and destructive. Far too many people seem to think that if they demand it, whatever 'it' happens to be, the State has the responsibility to do it. The assumption seems to be every social problem should be, and can be, fixed by the State.
But there is an impact on our sense of right and wrong if we do something ourselves or if we shout out for the state to 'do something' about it. 

After all, why would any one of us bother to lift a finger when someone else needs help if it's the responsibility of the State to 'do something'? This goes a long way in explaining why we have less volunteerism in our society today.