MARINA DEL REY, CA -- The AmeriCorps should be abolished, said the director of communications for the Ayn Rand Institute.
     "The AmeriCorps aims to indoctrinate young people into a life of sacrificing to society," said Scott McConnell. "That is the recipe for slavery, not freedom."
     McConnell said that the AmeriCorps is fundamentally anti-American because:

• It substitutes self-sacrifice for the individual's right to pursue his own happiness.
• It rejects individualism, adopting instead the idea that one's life belongs to others, the moral creed that underlies every dictatorship.
• It promotes service, obedience and duty as the standard of morality, not virtues such as honesty, productivity and independence.

     The growing bipartisan support for the AmeriCorps does not morally legitimize that program, McConnell said. Instead, such support demonstrates the ideological similarity and moral bankruptcy of the major political parties.
     Since 1997, the Ayn Rand Institute has been the only voice morally opposing volunteerism. Through the Institute's Anti-Servitude Internship Program, students have the opportunity to fulfill their school's volunteer requirements by working to abolish volunteerism.