(FORTUNE Magazine) – National service is hot in Washington. Senator Sam Nunn is strongly pushing his own national service bill, and other prominent politicians, including President Bush, have proposed other versions. Nunn's bill draws heavily on the ideas of Northwestern University sociologist Charles Moskos, who lays out his case in A Call to Civic Service (Free Press, $22.95). ''Civic service'' is a fine, ringing phrase, and indeed a magnificent ideal. Heaven knows we could use more of it. Yet Moskos's argument ends up showing what's wrong with the idea of a large federal program to make it happen. His proposal is briefly this: The federal government would hire about 400,000 youths a year to serve short terms in the military, and another 600,000 to do civilian tasks -- day care, prison work, care of old people, conservation work -- not currently performed by government or private organizations. The program would be open to all young people. Moskos thinks it would be especially beneficial to underclass youths but hopes members of all classes and races would participate. Although wages would be below market ($100 per week for civilians and two-thirds of active-duty pay for the military), his plan contains a key added incentive: Only by taking national service jobs would participants qualify for U.S. government grants and subsidized loans for education. Moskos's program would be entirely voluntary. He estimates the annual cost at about $7 billion.

Which leads to the first question: Why? What problems does Moskos want to solve by spending that money? His thinking on such a basic question is surprisingly fuzzy. He asserts that Americans are cynical about voting and distrust public institutions. National service would help, he argues, by promoting civic education and helping forge a national sense of community. But hold on -- it might help in this way if the distrust were a problem of perception, unjustified by facts. If Americans are right to distrust the institutions that they do, then national service probably won't make people feel good about them. This is a possibility Moskos does not consider. He also claims that college students are egoistic and narcissistic, and that national service would give them a strong dose of reality and elevate their concerns. True, performing service often has this effect. Yet his assertion follows a statement only four pages earlier that American youths are not self- absorbed and that many would happily serve others if given the proper opportunity. In other words, young peoples' attitudes sound like a nonproblem. ANOTHER QUESTION: Laudable as civic service is, why set up a federal program to promote it? On this matter A Call to Civic Service is laced with a rich irony of which Moskos seems totally unaware. He leads off by telling of people in New Mexico who get together every spring to clean irrigation ditches. They have performed this communal task, he writes, for over three centuries. Moskos sees this example as a ''parable for the way shared civic duties become the social glue that holds a society together.'' He is right. But the irony is that this activity happens without any government involvement and without anyone being paid. Similarly, one of Moskos's best examples of a successful volunteer program is the Guardian Angels, formed in 1979 to patrol New York City's crime-ridden subways. Besides promoting public safety and building members' characters, the group costs only about $40 annually per active member, according to Moskos. The irony is that the organization is entirely nongovernmental and, he writes, , ''refuses all foundation grants or public funds on the grounds that to accept such would compromise the organization's autonomy.'' In other words, the Guardian Angels explicitly choose to be the opposite of the kind of government-run, taxpayer-funded scheme Moskos wants. Couldn't a voluntary service program, once in place, give way easily to a compulsory program? To those who fear that possibility, Moskos is not very reassuring. It would happen, he writes, ''only if the voluntary program were widely viewed as a great success.'' Of course, he is quite optimistic about the program he proposes, so he is admitting the threat. Moreover, it is hard to be reassured about the threat to American youths' freedom by a man who writes, ''whether the service performed is compulsory or voluntary is not an essential element of any definition of national service.'' Bottom line: If all goes well, in Moskos's view, compulsory service will follow voluntary as the caboose follows the locomotive. THE MOST ATTACKED feature of the Nunn-Moskos proposal is that it would change student aid from a limited entitlement (you can apply for it and get it if you are admitted to a school and meet a means test) to an earned benefit (you would have to perform national service to get the aid). Yet this feature at least has a sensible impulse behind it. Why should students be subsidized to attend college and have to give nothing in return -- except, in some cases, repayment of a low-interest loan? Current student aid is particularly galling because it takes from many lower-income taxpayers who never went to college and gives to people who do not have high incomes now but will after education increases their earning power. The average college graduate can expect lifetime earnings hundreds of thousands of dollars more than can a nongraduate. Aid for higher education thus transfers wealth from the poor to the rich. So the national service requirement would introduce a bit of equity to an inequitable program. But it is not a solution. Nunn and Moskos explicitly want to make sure that national service participants do not perform jobs that would displace any current workers, meaning that these students would be kept out of activities in which they could be most productive. Where's the sense in that? If we want to repair a flawed policy for helping students finance their educations and want them to work as part of the process -- and these seem among the most concrete of a national service program's goals -- there is a better way. Let students work at the most lucrative jobs they can find (as they can now), turn all student grants into loans, raise interest rates on the loans to market levels, and take stronger measures against borrowers who default. And keep national service from getting ruined by government.

BOX: EXCERPT: National service must not be seen as a magical talisman, a mystical means for transforming socially different Americans into paragons of civic virtue. ((But)) by promoting a spirit of civic-mindedness, it will accomplish a range of tasks, thus reshaping American life in fundamental ways.