Isabel Paterson's argument against government charity hasn't held up, but it still offers important lessons about liberal, and libertarian, politics.
The Reading Room
The Libertarian With the Guillotine
In a 1943 chapter from her book The God of the Machine, titled “The Humanitarian with the Guillotine”, Isabel Paterson laid out a classic libertarian argument against government action for the common good.
History has not been kind to the essay. Eighty years on, it’s hard to imagine liberals, aside from the converted, finding value in it. The simple reason for her lack of persuasiveness is that Paterson was substantively wrong about humanitarian aid through the government, and about at least some of its opponents. To make matters worse, Paterson’s charity is asymmetrically applied to “humanitarians” and those who oppose them.
To help uncover what led Paterson astray,[1] it is useful to return to the text. A fuller application of public choice thinking might have helped Paterson reckon with the facts on the ground not shaking out the way she assumed they would. And a lesson from Adam Smith can help liberals who want to heed Paterson's warning avoid wielding the guillotine themselves.
Steel woman
The basic argument Paterson makes is useful for thinking about charity and government power. It is presented well by Chris Coyne and Abigail Hall (and paired with similar arguments from James Buchanan) in a short, open-access paper called The Samaritan with the Guillotine.
This version of Paterson’s argument is this:
- The ubiquitous desire to help others creates a mistaken impression that there is a single idea of “helping others” that is the goal of society, or “the common good”.
- On the assumption that there is a single, knowable common good, many people are willing to use government force to pursue it.
- To be pursued, the common good has to be defined. Regardless of what people in society imagine it to be, the people with the power to implement their plans will be the ones who define the common good to be pursued.
- Using government force to pursue the common good therefore means using force on everyone to pursue the plans of a few, partial actors.
- Charity is redistributive and not productive; the use of government force to pursue a single common good will be expensive, failing to appropriately weigh costs and benefits.
- Through this combination of factors, good people can justify collective harm while seeking the collective good.
This is a useful argument to keep in mind when we think about social problems. Turning to the government really does mean imposing force and increasing the potential for abuse. Turning the force of the state toward any goal should be undertaken cautiously and sparingly. Anyone pursuing a goal will have a difficult time being impartial about that goal. And charity really does require wealth to be produced first.
Furthermore, terrible things have been and are being done in the name of the common good. That fact needs to be reckoned with. The reason that Adam Smith’s “man of system” passage provokes such a strong reaction among people who agree with Paterson’s politics is that terrible things can be and are done by people who think they can fix the world, and who treat other people as though they are mere chess pieces. The French revolutionaries who ushered in the Reign of Terror and sent children to the guillotine believed they were building a better world.
This is the best version of the argument in “The Humanitarian with the Guillotine”, and, to be clear, Coyne and Hall haven’t missed something by engaging it—I refer to their paper because it is a useful treatment of a worthwhile idea. (And, after all, this is a common presentation of Paterson’s point.)
The problem is that if you pick up Paterson and read her for yourself, that’s not all she said.
Not just a road to hell
Paterson goes beyond saying that the government merely uses force when she invokes the guillotine. She is warning about mass death, like Soviet famines or the Great Leap Forward, that would follow from the government’s direction of productive resources towards a supposedly common good. She is making a much stronger claim than simply “Engaging the government uses force, and the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” This ‘road to hell’ analogy was available to her, and she chose the guillotine.
Paterson argues that those who would justify the suffering and death that comes from the pursuit of humanitarian action through government are “grafters, convicted pimps, and professional thugs” who will fritter away wealth. These charlatans take advantage of philanthropists who believe that we ought to live for the good of others. She contrasts this to self-interested people who worry first about producing value.
Further, Paterson does not believe that substantial suffering can be meaningfully alleviated by government action. She thinks it is up to those who are suffering—from drought or famine, for instance—to leave for somewhere where they won’t be vulnerable to such tragedies. She also seems to believe that, at least some of the time, suffering for a particular person is inevitable because of the characteristics of that person.
“What can one human being actually do for another? He can give from his own funds and his own time whatever he can spare. But he cannot bestow faculties which nature has denied; nor give away his own subsistence without becoming dependent himself. If he earns what he gives away, he must earn it first.” (emphasis added)
This framing of humanitarian aid leads to a sort of slippery slope by which production is endlessly sacrificed for the sake of philanthropy. Because people cannot be helped in a lasting sense through charity, those with the power to command resources will always have an incentive to demand more resources. And, says Paterson, regardless of whether the needy really are helped, the government philanthropists will get paid. This story is logically coherent within Paterson's framework.
There does not seem to be room in Paterson’s conception of government charity for learning on the margin in response to successes or failures, or for rationally self-interested collective action. This rigs the game, such that the logical progression she sets out—throw money at an insoluble problem, fail to solve it, demand more money, and repeat until resources are spent—is much more likely. She sets government charity up as teetering at the edge of a slippery slope, with accepting the hard truth that we should call the whole thing off the only way to step back from the edge.
In contrast to her depiction of humanitarian grafters, pimps, and thugs, Paterson paints a charitable picture of those opposed to charitable action through the government:
“The truth is that any proposed method of caring for the marginal want and distress incident to human life by establishing a permanent fixed charge upon production would be adopted most gladly by those who now oppose it, if it were practicable. They oppose it because it is impracticable in the nature of things.” (emphasis added)
For Paterson, those who oppose government charity do not simply have policy preferences like anyone else. Those opposed to government charity are realistic and interested in human survival. It is from this realism that Paterson believes their policy preferences—the only right policy preferences—naturally follow. This is the only explanation presented or sought after.
In contrast, humanitarians are presented as rubes or charlatans, not considered as individual actors with both self-interested and benevolent motivations and a mix of true and mistaken beliefs. For Paterson, there is nothing to learn from their choices, and no expectation that they will learn. There is no idea of politics as something from which everyone believes they can benefit by reducing transaction costs—of politics as a type of mutually beneficial exchange, to use James Buchanan’s terminology.
In other words, Paterson falls for both public choice traps: she fails to treat people as people, and her examination of politics is romantic rather than curious or scientific. The reason? She is a woman of system, who sees individuals playing out the parts she imagines for them.
Libertarians with the Guillotine
These blind spots might explain how Paterson got things so wrong.
While there are humanitarian projects that we do not know how to solve, such as establishing the rule of law or democratic buy-in, there is also an awful lot we can do for the most vulnerable people, even through the government.
Libertarians are not immune to the temptation to act as men of system. They imagine a better world, one without the programs that they oppose, where aid is voluntary and everyone can save themselves. They are captivated by this vision. And, with access to power, they might not even bother to move the chess pieces. They might simply release the blade.
We don't need to speculate about the ability of governments to provide meaningful help because we can now observe the fallout of nearly dismantling the world's largest government-backed humanitarian aid agency, USAID. It is devastating.
Take only a few examples: PEPFAR funding to treat HIV/AIDS, treatment for diarrhea and pneumonia for children, and food aid. In these three areas alone, Boston University researcher Brooke Nichols estimates that over 200,000 children and infants have already died due to aid disruption. Half a million[2] preventable child deaths are expected this year from the disruption of just these programs. This does not include other aid. It does not include chronic health problems that could have been avoided. It does not include the effect on adults. Half a million is an estimate of only the deaths of children and infants, from only these three programs.
Even if we assume these numbers are off by an order of magnitude, and we assume that these programs were equivalent to the cost of all funding allocated to USAID spending in 2024[3] and that USAID spending had no other benefits, that would work out to less than $100 per American[4] per year to save the lives of 50,000 children. The annual GDP per capita in the United States is about $66,000 this year.
One can agree or disagree that this is worth it, but it is practicable. It is something the government was accomplishing without destroying the productive capacity of Americans. One can still oppose government-provided aid. But these reasons for doing so—it won’t work, and it will ruin us—aren’t available. This changes the stakes of the argument.
Taking Paterson at her word, we should not assume that she would oppose a government program that saved so many lives while the United States became more prosperous. But we should also notice just how wrong she was about her opposition. Those who are cutting humanitarian aid are not moved by evidence that it was practicable.
When it is not socialist, but libertarian utopianism putting people at risk, we might modify Patterson's words:
“With [the cost of cutting aid] demonstrated to the hilt, we have the peculiar spectacle of the man who condemned [hundreds of thousands of] people to starvation, [disease, and death] admired by [libertarians] whose declared aim is to see to it that [their policies be implemented without compromise].”
Infatuation with a perfect system of government and indifference to the costs of bypassing the ordinary, persuasion-based liberal politics that Adam Smith saw as a check on the “man of system” is the danger of romantic politics that treats people as abstractions. Liberal political change might only yield “the best the people can bear.” not the most we can imagine.
None of this implies that aid couldn’t be done more effectively or more efficiently through private charity, or even just through better-designed government programs. The cost of getting aid to people who need it is frustratingly high, and we should try to lower that cost. Force is still bad; empowered governments are still potentially dangerous, and people can be persuaded to care for each other. If we can provide aid voluntarily, we should. And if we successfully make the case for its value, we are more likely to.
But it is up to those of us who believe that there are dangers to providing aid through the government (for example, the danger that a small group of actors might abruptly cut off support that would prevent tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths) to make that case. Charity can be the result of private, voluntary decisions and not a chessmaster or an executioner.
Paterson made her case forcefully, and she relied on persuasion to do it. She tried to change our politics to change the world. Good liberals must follow her example and insist that people are people, and that individuals matter. Relying on persuasion won’t only reduce the danger of following the road to hell. It will ensure more robust support for those who need help.
—
[1] Paterson was also wrong about the nature of the violence being inflicted on those conquered by the Nazis. As jarring as this is, it’s unrelated to her argument and is not what undermines it.
[2] Nichols estimates 464,000 child deaths from these programs in 2025, while a new Lancet study estimates nearly 690,000 total deaths in children under 5 years old in 2025 from the disruption of aid. [3] $21.7 billion in 2024, from the Office of Management and Budget and the U.S. Office of the Treasury via USA Facts, accessed 20 June 2025. This number was substantially higher in 2022 ($31.2 billion) and 2023 ($37.7 billion), but the USAID budget was below $20 billion (2024 dollars) from 1980–2021.
[3] At an estimated population of 340 million, $27.1 billion is $79.70 per resident of the United States.
Comments: