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Overview
The Vampire State is a popular and provocative look at the muddled way we talk about economics in America. In engaging prose, Fred L. Block argues that many familiar metaphors, such as the image of the government as a vampire sucking the lifeblood from our economy, are patently false and based on bad economics. He explains why balancing the federal budget will not solve our economic problems, shows the flaws in the arguments for a global free trade regime, and uses a series of counter-metaphors to suggest reforms we desperately need.Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
In Block's reckoning, the Republican-led drive to drastically cut government social spending, eliminate the federal deficit, dismantle regulation and offer deep tax cuts reflects a misguided anti-state frenzy. Such thinking, he argues, stems from pervasive economic images and metaphors percolating through the body politic, metaphors ultimately derived from Christian allegory and biological phenomena: the economy as a battlefield of natural selection and survival of the fittest; the assumption that redemptive pain will accompany austerity; the image of a vampire-like, bloated government draining the blood out of society. Chair of the UC-Davis sociology department, Block proposes a series of steps to halt the growing polarization of rich and poor, to encourage popular entrepreneurialism, job creation, productive consumption and overall efficiency, coupled with international structural reforms to counteract the antidemocratic tendencies of financial markets. His powerful primer stands much conventional wisdom on its head. Translation rights: New Press. (Aug.)Kirkus Reviews
An ultraliberal academic's immodest proposal for a new world socioeconomic order—one appreciably more statist than those envisioned by Plato in his Republic or Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan.Before presenting his against-the-grain initiatives, Block (The Mean Season, 1987, etc.) engages in an extended rant as to how right-wing extremists have falsely convinced large segments of the American electorate that the US government is a malefic vampire sucking the domestic economy's lifeblood. In aid of this arguable premise, the author (Sociology/Univ. of Calif., Davis) cites examples of so-called conventional wisdom he deems irrational, if not mad. Cases in point range from faith in balanced federal budgets, deregulation, free markets, low taxes, and unrestricted trade through an abiding antipathy to activist governance and inflationary procedures. Block dismisses any notion that deficits depress private-sector investment, affect savings rates, or cause other of the financial harms ascribed to them. Getting down to business, Block obligingly furnishes a detailed agenda that could put the country on course toward a practical utopia (a term whose oxymoronic character he concedes). He would make managed trade and fixed currency-exchange rates hallmarks of foreign policy. On the home front, he would introduce wage controls to keep the aggregate compensation of top corporate executives at no more than 25 times that of low-income or jobless individuals and cut the work week (possibly in half). Expressly wary of elitist, individualist entrepreneurs, Block would also use the power of government to encourage establishment of a network of small firms and cooperatives. In time, he asserts, his incentive-free revolution could be taken global.
A wish-list tract amounting to the triumph of hope over experience for its trust in the constructive capacities of big government.