Do not take this chapter's fears as solely American. But what de Tocqueville writes about may upset some American myths. I suggest Daniel Patrick Moynihan's Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding to see how we have renamed labels for certain behaviors. [I recommend Moynihan's book - any of his books - smart guy and all that, but I cannot understand what I meant by the preceding sentence. I may have mistaken it for another title, which I cannot now pick out from a list of his books. Please accept it as a sign of a poor memory stuck in a place where it could check its citations, because that is what I am stuck with now. Now go read Moynihan. sch 11/7/23.]
... To relieve their own necessities at the cost of the public treasury, appears to them to be the easiest and most open, if not the only, way they have to rise above a condition which no longer contents them; place-hunting becomes the most generally followed of all trades. This must especially be the case, in those great centralized monarchies in which the number of paid offices is immense, and the tenure of them tolerably secure, so that no one despairs of obtaining a place, and of enjoying it as undisturbedly as a hereditary fortune
Chapter XX: The Trade Of Place-Hunting In Certain Democratic Countries
Today we have corporate welfare and food stamps and no-bid government contracts and governmental consulting contracts. Look at the careers of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville for place-hunting examples from times closer to de Tocqueville's day.
sch
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