C.S. Lewis wrote that, "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive." Good intentions are often behind the most deadly of government policies, from humanitarian interventionism to regulating our eating habits.
C.S. Lewis wrote that, "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive." Good intentions are often behind the most deadly of government policies, from humanitarian interventionism to regulating our eating habits.
C.S. Lewis wrote that, "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive." Good intentions are often behind the most deadly of government policies, from humanitarian interventionism to regulating our eating habits.
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With me today is Daniel McAdams.
Good to see you, Daniel.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
Today, we'd like to talk a little bit about the fallacy of good intentions.
You know, that's been around a long time.
It implies that government can always take care of us as long as it's well-intended.
And libertarians certainly know that the good intentions of government sometimes backfire.
I want to start off with reading a couple quotes who have strongly made this point over the years because this issue's been made a long time because it usually involves religion, and they'll use religion to hide behind using force to do good.
But the first quote I want to read comes from C.S. Lewis, who wrote it in God in the Dock.
And C.S. Lewis said, Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.
It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.
The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep.
His cupidity may at some point be satiated.
But those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
And I think that says a lot.
But another favorite of mine, Isabel Patterson, wrote in God of the Machine.
It's interesting that they both use, put the word God in there, and sometimes what they're pointing out is the abuse sometimes of using belief in God to do good, and they're not using it properly.
But her quote comes from The God of the Machine.
She wrote it in 1943.
She was from the old right and in the middle of World War II.
And her statement is very strong.
Her position is very strong.
And it comes from a chapter in her book.
And this is a famous chapter.
It's called The Humanitarian with the Guillotine.
And obviously, you know, that's pretty straightforward and that raises the interest of, you know, the guillotine and Jacobinism, you know, doing good.
The Humanitarian with the Guillotine00:11:05
And I think we have some of that going on today.
But her statement was: most of the harm in the world is done by good people and not by accident, lapse, or omission.
It is a result of the deliberate actions long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends.
All this very well-intended things.
And the world suffers, sometimes we suffer war, and sometimes we suffer depressions because, you know, the good intentions are one thing.
And I've always argued the case that most of the people I knew in Congress, you know, didn't deliberately want to bring out poverty.
I didn't meet anybody who actually really believed that poverty was good and we're going to mess it up.
There are a few screwballs who say chaos and the radicals like chaos because they can gather up the peoples and gain more power.
There's a little bit of that going on.
But the average member of Congress is well-intended and this message should be for them as well.
But it reminds me of a story I used to tell more often than I do now in my very first speech in 1974 in a political sense.
It was a story about George Washington.
You know, Washington died at a rather young age.
I think he's 63 years old, you know, and he had got pneumonia.
Of course, they did not have antibiotics.
So they consulted the best doctors known to get the best advice.
They came together.
What can we do for him?
Because he became deathly ill.
And the decision was, well-intended, was to put leeches on him and drain his blood, and he promptly died.
So the knowledge of the time, well intended, sometimes have very bad results.
And I'm just wondering how many things we might be able to think about in today's events, how this principle is being misused.
And I think that the number of things I can think of, we can't mention them in this program because there are so many.
Yeah.
Well, certainly in the international sphere with the rise of the humanitarian interventionists, you know, this really took place, I would sort of date it back to the post-communist, the beginning of the post-communist era, when there was still the need to shape the world a certain way.
And so you had the rise of, for example, the UN, which as much as we may disagree with international government, it was originally conceived as a way to protect the sovereignty of nations because it was a group of sovereign nations.
Well, this all changed in 2005 at the World Summit, where the UN officially adopted the policy of responsibility to protect.
And what it says is that sovereign states no longer have the right to remain sovereign if other states determine that they're abusing their people.
Of course, they pass no criteria.
It's all left very vague.
But what it does is really opens up the international sphere for the same kinds of busybodies and do-gooders you're talking about.
And, you know, after World War I, Wilson was very strong in self-determination.
A lot of words that came out of his mouth in his writing sounded pretty good, and yet they were never followed.
A lot of evil came out of it, and more government came of it.
But the basic principle that I see being violated here is that governments somehow or another know enough and smart enough and won't make mistakes to take care of us, to protect us from ourselves.
If the government is established to protect us from ourselves, I think the ball game is over because then they're going to regulate our eating habits, our exercise habits, our everything that we do, the government will be regulating us.
And I think that we have drifted into that and now it's invited political correctness.
The people who are the radical PC people are going to discipline us and tell you what you can do.
And it's a nightmare.
And it's a destruction of the principle of liberty.
And I think this is true in foreign policy.
Of course, in foreign policies, it's even very dramatic with our recent policy in the Middle East.
And it reminds us of, and people who are interested in this subject should look at the French Revolution where the word Jacobinism came because they were well-intended.
And Patterson uses the word humanitarians with a guillotine.
And I'm sure what she's thinking about is the guillotine.
You got the guillotine if you didn't go along with doing good.
But it was a bunch of thugs that were deciding what was going good.
So in a way, we're following that a little bit now with the concept of American exceptionalism.
And in a sense, it's bad enough in your own country, but you still do have some access to your leaders, and there still is some ability to change things.
But when this kind of action takes place thousands of miles away, most people who were behind it or who are being forced to pay for it don't get to see the terrible results.
If you look at the three, they're called the humanitarian Vulcans, and that's Samantha Power, who's the U.S. ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, who's the National Security Advisor, and Hillary Clinton, who at the time was the Secretary of State.
These are the three people who hectored Obama the most.
You've got to attack Libya.
In the name of human rights, we've got to attack Libya.
It's the humanitarian mission, and they got their way.
Nobody asked the Libyans if they wanted it.
A small group of jihadists wanted it, and they came out on top, and Libya is destroyed.
They did the same thing with Syria, and Syria is destroyed, and on and on and on.
So they never have to face the consequences of their actions.
And the question they don't ask is about the unseen.
You know, the very important economic point that Hazlitt made as well as Bastiat.
Yes, it seems like a good idea that we preserve human rights in this country, but what is the unseen?
First, they can make a mistake, and the second, they have to use force and intimidation.
They have to take tax money from people and the mistakes that they made.
But then also, it invites people to abuse this.
Although Patterson says that most of the harm done is by the good intentions and even greater than the Hitlers of the world, which makes you stop and wonder.
But some will take advantage of it.
When you look at it, I think some of the neocon leaders and the people who push war use good things.
Oh, slavery, we've got to get rid of it.
So we have to kill 600,000 Americans because this is a good thing.
So it's always a good thing.
But the unseen of how much is sacrificed in the mayor of rights, they all of a sudden are thinking collectively, how do we help this people, this country, or this state?
And not how do we teach people what liberty is all about?
Why is it an individual issue?
And why is that humanitarian?
You know, humanitarian should be a good word, but in their understanding, it's horrible.
And right now, in the presidential elections, more so than ever, everybody is a populist humanitarian.
We're going to settle things.
we're going to even out the income, the rich are going to be, they won't address the subject of why the rich get richer, but they'll say, we will take care of this, you know, and use this to make everything even, Stephen.
Yeah, absolutely.
And, you know, going back to someone like Samantha Power, she said force can be justified on humanitarian grounds.
Yeah, there you go.
You know, and the other thing she said when she was moving over to the UN, she said she was tired of doing all this, quote, ranky-dink advocacy for Christian rights and these things.
She wants a piece of the action.
So as soon as she got into the action, is when she started pushing for this war.
And you mentioned a few things that pushed war, but in Libya, it was very interesting, and I wrote about this a couple years ago.
It was all pushed on a lie by one NGO, one Libyan NGO in the UN, put forth a false report, and he admitted later that it was falsified.
That was the basis of the UN resolution that spiraled down and led to the intervention.
Well, I would put them in the category of taking advantage of the people who want to do good.
People in Congress vote for these things because it seems like they're helping.
The poor have to be helped, and human rights have to be protected.
We have to bring peace around the world.
But it just gets out of control because they don't look at the basic principle.
And all of a sudden, we have a president, not the current one, but before, establish this principle of preemptive war for the good of the world.
And therefore, we become aggressors.
At the same time, the current president said, you know, to make you safe and secure, and it's in your benefit, we have to talk about the right of the president to issue assassination orders on American citizens.
And all done in the name of good.
And this is, to me, a very, very important issue.
If we ever expect to move toward peace, we'd have to understand this and try to get people to understand the importance of individual liberty versus the collective.
You know, the good of the people.
And that governments have no right to do this.
They have no ability to do this.
And how do they know what's best for us, for you?
They have no way of knowing this.
And yet they assume this.
And I've had members of Congress personally tell me, oh, the reason I'm voting for this Patriot Act is that it'll provide the security and the people are too dumb to know.
And it actually uses that word.
And of course, the current administration used that to force this medical care system on us too.
And it sort of comes down to the philosophical concept of non-interventionism, releasing yourself from the impulse to interfere in someone else's life just because you disagree with how they're living it.
And it goes really across the board from foreign policy to medical issues to just even a nosy neighbor.
You know, talking about those leaders who will use it to force things on us versus the people who support it would be the Obamacare program.
Who doesn't want to help people get medical care?
I mean, I'm very, very sympathetic to that.
But what happens if you endorse a system that makes it worse?
So there's a reason for that.
But then you have the administration, along with Jonathan Gruper, who is making a lot of money promoting this.
And when he gets caught on tape, he says, well, the people are too stupid to know what's good for them.
We know what's best for them, and they need government medicine.
And that's evil combining it with the good intentions.
But people get sucked into this and thinking that they have to believe government.
The only really nice thing going on now are people are getting more skeptical of government, but they can be changed so quickly and say, you know, a couple weeks ago it was ISIS, you know, and now there's something else.
Belief in Government's Role00:00:59
So it changes rather rapidly.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in.
And if you care to check on this anymore about the evil of good intentions, read Isabel Patterson.
And this issue to me is so important that we understand this, because if not, we don't understand what freedom is all about.
And if we condone this whole idea that the government knows what's best and tells us what to do in our best interest, governments can't do that and they cannot protect us from ourselves.
That is a fallacy and that is what too many conservatives and too many liberals do.
One does it in the social sense, the other does it in the economic sense and that is why we have horrendous problems and why we have chaos around the world and we're involved in all the chaos.
Someday I truly believe that we're going to have a generation come about and understand these issues and all of a sudden the world could be changed.