Many years ago, John F. Kennedy made an attempt to overturn the American tradition of individual rights by offering this false alternative: "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." Almost no one at the time pointed out that another option was offered by the Founding Fathers when they established a Constitutional Republic based on inalienable rights: free, autonomous individuals pursuing their own happiness and not having to choose between being parasites or sacrificial lambs. Every citizen, they held, should have the liberty to enjoy his own life, free of government dictates.

More people should have spoken out against Kennedy. Because they did not, the calls for sacrifice continue, with little opposition. In a radio address to the nation before last year's summit, President Clinton identified the goals of the "Presidents' Summit on Service":

Citizen service is the main way we recognize that we are responsible for one another. It is the very American idea that we meet our challenges not through heavy-handed government or as isolated individuals, but as members of a true community, with all of us working together.

But what if all of us don't want to work together? What if some of us think that such collectivism is a "Nazi idea," not a "very American idea"?

And, of course, the "heavy-handed government" that Clinton claims to reject is ready to rear its head, as indeed it must, when people believe that your life doesn't belong to you:

I challenge schools and communities in every state to make service a part of the curriculum in high schools and even in middle schools. There are many creative ways to do this--including giving students credit, making service part of the curriculum, putting service on a student's transcript or even requiring it, as Maryland does. Every young American should be taught the joy and the duty of serving, and should learn it at the moment when it will have the most enduring impact on the rest of their lives.

Denying students their high school diplomas is surely "creative" volunteerism. Such coercion is at the heart of a plethora of similar proposals--from those of Ted Kennedy's to those of William F. Buckley's.

Supporters of self-sacrifice always end up using government to compel sacrifice; it's perfectly logical and proper if it's accepted that individuals don't own their own lives. Of course, in order to give, someone has to receive. Altruists never explain what all of this receiving of other people's sacrifices does to the moral worth of those on the receiving end. They just want sacrifice, with pressure groups deciding who gets sacrificed to whom at any particular moment.

Can we maintain a society of creative, productive individuals if feeding soup to drug addicts takes precedence over studying and career preparation?

Can we expect people to take responsibility for their own lives if they're told that everyone else has a "duty" to take care of them?

Can we keep our rights as individuals if Mr. Clinton and his colleagues tell us what our "joy and duty" should be? In the 1960s Lyndon Johnson forced hundreds of thousands of Americans into the "joy and duty of service" in Vietnam, a concept of joy which Mr. Clinton eschewed.

Can we have a free society if every young American accepts the "joy and duty of serving" as the moral justification for his life? Isn't this the "joy" that the Hitler Jugend were taught at Nuremberg?

We cannot maintain a free society if the "duty and service" morality of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia take over America. Unless we tell Mr. Clinton, the former Presidents, and every politician we can find: "Volunteer to do anything you want to do. Just don't volunteer me or my children or tell me I'm immoral unless I agree. I have no duty to sacrifice myself to anybody. My life belongs to me, not to you." Whatever the Presidents say to mark the summit's anniversary, our answer--the answer of free men--must remain the same.

Mr. Ralston is a former director of development at the Ayn Rand Institute. The Institute promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.