The Samaritan with the Guillotine

Fifty years ago James Buchanan introduced the idea of the "Samaritan's Dilemma" whereby the charity provided by a Samaritan results in perverse effects due to moral hazard problems. Writing three decades before Buchanan, Isabel Paterson also sought to understand how the desire to engage in charity could do harm. In "The Humanitarian with the Guillotine," she discussed how embracing the humanitarian impulse could undermine individual freedom and result in tyranny. This paper connects Paterson's humanitarian and Buchanan's Samaritan. We identify five themes that remain relevant today. These include: (1) the nature of charity (the transfer of existing wealth versus the production of wealth), (2) the difference in the sources of charity (private versus state) and their implications, (3) dependency and its social costs, (4) self-governance and an ethic of individual responsibility, and (5) the importance of rules for overcoming the Samaritan's dilemma and protecting individual freedom.

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