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neighborly love and charity have been preached for generations: yet its establishment in Scandinavia is mostly the work of a generation of atheists or lukewarm believers. It is the product of a political struggle over the distribution of income and privilege, not a gift from heaven.
  We have in post-World-War-II Sweden a situation in which the war on poverty has been won; urban rehabilitation is a fact; housing is subsidized so that the working class pays no higher share of its income for a home than does the middle class; medical and dental care at nominal fees is available to all; education up through the doctorate is free; unestablished newlyweds receive loans to set up housekeeping guaranteed by the state; every expectant mother is given care, and families automatically receive child support; a parent can take leave from work with pay to care for a sick child; early retirement with nearly full pension is a realizable goal for everyone; no one suffers destitution because of loss of earning power, and so on. Furthermore, help to the individual is not dependent on the charitable whims of the wealthy, on a humble and pious attitude on the part of the recipient, or on the persuasiveness of his pleas for help. His right to care and help is as solid as his right to vote or to own property, and they are given across the board, to the good and the bad alike, to the friendly and the obnoxious, in predetermined manners and amounts. In the period since World War II, Sweden has organized humanitarianism from top to bottom, cradle to grave, like no other part of the world.
  Organized, systematized humanitarianism has both merits and drawbacks. It is not dependent on grace or the mercy of the Virgin or a patron saint, or even on human intervention through individual acts of charity. Both divine and arbitrary human intervention are unpredictable, and both may be subject to bias. Welfare ideology seeks rational, predictable solutions to man's tribulations. To meet the demands for justice and equality of that ideology, rational humanitarianism must be meted out on a predetermined impersonal basis.
  But while humanitarianism may become more evenly distributed through the logic of rationalism, in the process it loses its heart. The conscience of the average citizen is soothed by the assumed reliability of bureaucratized humanitarianism, and he begins to believe that his fellows will be taken care of by the system without any effort on his 

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