Michael Huemer Quotes

Voters, activists, and political leaders of the present day are in the position of medieval doctors. They hold simple, prescientific theories about the workings of society and the causes of social problems, from which they derive a variety of remedies - almost all of which prove either ineffectual or harmful. Society is a complex mechanism whose repair, if possible at all, would require a precise and detailed understanding of a kind that no one today possesses. Unsatisfying as it may seem, the wisest course for political agents is often simply to stop trying to solve society’s problems.

If anarchy had to be achieved through a sudden abolition of all government, it would be a remote prospect. Such a rapidly achieving anarchy would also likely have disappointing results - if government were to suddenly disappear, without any prior development of such alternative institutions as private security and arbitration firms, chaos would likely ensue. Perhaps alternative institutions would arise spontaneously in due time, but it is also likely that chaos would give rise to immediate demands for a new government. For these reasons, it is desirable to develop a gradualist model of the abolition of government in which alternative institutions grow at the same time that government shrinks.

Given the existence of government, the people who are most likely to wind up in control of that government are those who (a) have the greatest drive for power, (b) have the skills needed for seizing it (for example, the ability to intimidate or manipulate others), and (c) are unperturbed by moral compunctions about doing what is required to seize power. These individuals are not in the game for the money. They are in it for the pleasure of exercising power. The way one feels the exercise of power is, all too often, by abusing those under one’s power while observing their helplessness to resist.

When the state actively intervenes in society--for example, by issuing commands and coercively harming those who disobey its commands--the state then becomes responsible for any resulting harms, in a way that the state would not be responsible for harms that it merely (through lack of knowledge) fails to prevent. Imagine that I see a woman at a bus stop opening a bottle of pills, obviously about to take one. Before I decide to snatch the pills away from her and throw them into the sewer drain, I had better be very certain that the pills are actually something harmful. If it turns out that I have taken away a medication that the woman needed to forestall a heart attack, I will be responsible for the results. On the other hand, if, due to uncertainty as to the nature of the drugs, I decide to leave the woman alone, and it later turns out that she was swallowing poison, I will not thereby be responsible for her death. For this reason, intervention faces a higher burden of proof than nonintervention.

The total number of people killed by their own governments in the twentieth century has been estimated at 123 million. These victims, in general, were killed for belonging to the wrong groups, whether it be the wrong race, the wrong class, or the wrong ideology. The murderous regimes did not stop at the thought that their crimes against humanity would cost them a great deal of tax revenues, for they were not primarily seeking money. They were moved partly by hatred, partly by the love of power, and partly by the drive to remake the world in accordance with their ideologies. The number of people killed by their own governments in the twentieth century was more than four and a half times greater than the number killed by nongovernmental murderers - which raises the question of whether a strong government should be counted more a source of security or a source of danger.