“Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” How Quaint.

A half-century ago these words of John F. Kennedy inspired much of a generation. The words would seem to be timeless. But until recently, his classic defense of the separation of church and state would also seem to have been timeless. Then a serious conservative candidate for the Presidency of the United States, Rick Santorum, characterized Mr. Kennedy’s defense of the separation of church and state as a cause for vomiting. So how might present-day conservatives feel about John F. Kennedy’s exhortation to ask what you can do for your country?

In a recent column in The Wall Street Journal, Lawrence B. Lindsey chastised Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner for using the phrase "privilege of being an American" (February 29). Mr. Lindsey, a former Federal Reserve governor and a member of George W. Bush’s administration, argued at length that what Americans have are not privileges but rights. Moreover, the principal right of Mr. Lindsey’s focus seemed to be the right to not be taxed. Absent from Mr. Lindsey’s civics lesson was any mention of responsibilities and obligations that might be part of the citizenship equation.

Perhaps in this age of it's-all-the government's fault, the absence is understandable. Still, one can occasionally feel a bit of nostalgia for those long ago times when high school civics classes and youth organizations left the young and impressionable with the thought that citizenship and obligations were not mutually exclusive concepts.

The responses to Mr. Lindsey’s column ran the gamut from, yeah, we’re taxed too much, to yeah, we’re taxed way too much. But then, the editorial pages of the Journal are not a place where one is likely to find much support for collective action by the citizenry, which is another way to describing what government and taxation actually are.

So what opinion might Misters Santorum and Lindsey, and other present-day conservatives, express about “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country”? Well, let’s just say that altruism, a sense of collective responsibility, and civic obligations do not seem to rank very high among the virtues admired by 21st Century American conservatives. Now if President's Kennedy's exhortation came with tax cuts. . . .