Matt Yglesias

The Limits of Service

A friend Twitters:

Service is great! But MLK’s life and work wasn’t about volunteering: it was about altering the distribution of power.

Quite so. I mean, it was about volunteering. But it was about volunteering for the cause of social justice—for a new, fairer, and more equal distribution of political and economic power. It wasn’t about doing charity work. More on this later.