The Samaritan with the Guillotine

Originally published in The Independent Review

Isabel Paterson’s “The Humanitarian with the Guillotine” sought to understand how the desire to engage in charity could do harm, noting that the embrace of the humanitarian impulse could undermine individual freedom and result in tyranny. The connections between her paper and James Buchanan’s “The Samaritan’s Dilemma” are carefully identified in this essay.

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