Returning The Favor is Dirty Jobs Mike Rowe's latest venture. "Follow host Mike Rowe as he travels the country in search of remarkable people making a difference in their communities. Returning the Favor..."
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Here's a blurb from an article on it, Mike Rowe’s Little Platoons
Edmund Burke famously said in his Reflections on the Revolution in France: “To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections.” Burke’s assertion was a challenge to the French radicals’ promotion of the idea that citizens give their primary loyalty to the all-encompassing State. The modern state crafted by the these eighteenth-century Revolutionaries, and honed by twentieth-century Leftists, was intended to provide for all the needs of its citizens. Intermediary institutions, like the church and local civic societies—the traditional providers for the unmet needs of the community—would be rendered obsolete in the face of the nation-state.
But in the United States, as in many other modern nation-states, the growth of centralized government has not yet obviated the spirit of voluntarism and the desire of the ordinary man to help his neighbors. Indeed, local communities in America are alive and well, despite the best efforts of progressive activists and federal bureaucrats to take responsibility for every facet of the lives of Americans, by promoting such utopians notions as “free” universal healthcare, a “living wage” or guaranteed minimum income for all, even the elimination of poverty altogether.
It is the enduring spirit of community voluntarism that Returning the Favor—a web television series created and hosted by actor Mike Rowe—celebrates....