Steven E. Lansburg in yesterday’s New York Times:

Even if you’ve just lost your job, there’s something fundamentally churlish about blaming the very phenomenon that’s elevated you above the subsistence level since the day you were born. If the world owes you compensation for enduring the downside of trade, what do you owe the world for enjoying the upside?

This gives me great ideas for other moral arguments! For example,

It is churlish for people to complain and whine when they’re drowning. They were happy enough to drink water earlier in their lives. Their bodies are mostly made of water, for crying out loud.

Or:

Can you believe how people don’t want to get shot? Don’t they realize that our forefathers used bullets to shoot the Redcoats and win our freedom? Where would we be today without gun-related deaths?

Or:

Americans nowadays seem to want medicine whenever they get sick! Can you believe it? Don’t they realize that without plagues and pestilence, Europeans would never have conquered the New World?

Courtesy of the National Service-Learning Partnership, here is a chart showing the presidential candidates’ positions on AmeriCorps, community service and service-learning in schools, student loans in return for community service, and related issues. Some highlights: Chris Dodd would have required 100 hours of service for high school graduation across the nation (which would be a very controversial federal mandate). John Edwards would create a new Community Corps and reward schools that require service for graduation. Hillary Clinton co-sponsored the Public Service Academy Act to create a new academy in Washington, DC that would prepare people for civilian service. Mike Huckabee would expand civilian national service; and John McCain has a record of supporting AmeriCorps. I have written before about Barack Obama’s ambitious plan.

(Syracuse Airport) Public Agenda’s president, Ruth Wooden, writes, “Neither Third-Party Candidate nor Leadership Alone Can Solve the Problem.” The “problem” that she has in mind is destructive partisanship, but one could define it more generally as dysfunctional politics. Fortunately, some citizens are at work organizing public deliberation and public-spirited advocacy during this campaign season.

Public Agenda itself is an example. The organization “advocates for a greater reliance on public dialogue to come to agreement on difficult issues.” As Wooden writes, “Until leaders invest trust in the American people, create more opportunities for average citizens to explore issues from multiple points of view and help them confront the facts of our nation’s greatest challenges through dialogue, our government will remain shackled by political maneuvering and gamesmanship.” Check out the Public Agenda “Primer on Public Engagement.”

Mobilize.org just pulled off its Party for the Presidency, a gathering of 150 young people from around the United States who developed the “Democracy 2.0 agenda” to guide their advocacy over the next year. See this coverage in the Huffington Post.

The Study Circles Resource Center, a key organization in the movement for deliberative citizenship, is about to relaunch itself as “Everyday Democracy.” As one of many activities connected to the relaunch, the Center is starting an Everyday Democracy Book Club, run by Frances Moore Lappé.

And then there’s the November Fifth Coalition, which is gearing up for a significant statement about how you can be involved.

(Gate 44, Washington National Airport): In December and January, I’ve taken 20 separate flight segments for family reasons and/or business. Two flights have been canceled outright and at least another eight have been seriously delayed. I guess nothing could be more boring than complaints about “the airlines.” Still, I wonder:

1. Does anyone review an airline’s decision to cancel, rather than delay, a flight? I presume that a delay costs the airline more money, because it has to be pay overtime and perhaps divert an airplane. A cancellation, however, costs the passengers much more–not only time, but also cash for wasted airport parking, ground transportation, food, etc. Canceling a flight that could instead be delayed–thereby shifting costs to the customer–should be penalized. Right now, we can’t even get reliable information about why flights are canceled.

2. What’s wrong with the market as a whole? Why doesn’t a competitive market produce more reliable service, at least by some of the major carriers? This is not a rhetorical question–I believe that markets sometimes work and sometimes don’t, and we should be able to diagnose the reason for failure in this case.

On a couple of occasions, I have fantasized about massive civil disobedience by passengers. For example, one morning, I pictured the enormous line for check-in at Dulles sitting down and refusing to budge until the airline started to issue apologies and vouchers. But the difference between a sit-in and ordinary service would have been difficult to detect.

Contrary to what I wrote yesterday, today’s newspapers provide a bumper crop of positive stories about young voters in New Hampshire. David Nitkin in the Baltimore Sun captured the message I would most like to convey:

Voters under age 30, taking part in their first or second presidential election, belong to a deeply involved generation that volunteers at higher rates than their elders, said Peter Levine, director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, at the University of Maryland, College Park.

But as they head to the polls, it is not clear whether younger voters are forging lifetime habits or are satisfied with their options.

“The big question has been, would they see voting as a helpful way to do anything about these issues?” said Levine, who surveyed 400 college students last year. “I think that they are ready to get the pitch, but they are not yet sold on the idea that the political system is the way to solve their problems.”