A New York Times Magazine poll recently asked readers if, given the possibility, they would go back in time and kill Baby Hitler.

Ben Carson, a Seventh Day Adventist, was duly asked by journalists, and responded with a firm No: “I'm not in favor of aborting anybody.”

As my Register colleague Matthew Archbold then reported, Jeb!, the lifelong Catholic, subsequently responded: “Hell Yeah!…You gotta step up, man.”

But Jeb!’s explanation wasn’t without studied qualification, as he went on to point out that time travel carries with it unforeseen consequences, as illustrated in, erm, Back to the Future.

But let’s take this answer at face value, because it does reveal something of the man — someone that only this week the great ballot box hit Eric Cantor had called “clearly the serious candidate in the room”, and ’96 smash electoral success Bob Dole hailed as “the most qualified candidate”. 

(Wait — Bob Dole? Did someone say something about going back in time?)

So what is the problem in the killing Baby Hitler hypothesis?

One under-appreciated factor is analogous to what Nobel laureate Friedrich von Hayek called in another context “the pretense of knowledge”.

“To act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which in fact we do not possess, is likely to make us do much harm.”

Jeb! assumes that he has enough knowledge in order to be able to take this action.

Now the ‘pretense of knowledge’ affects all persons — private individuals as well as politicians. But politicians have all the apparatus of the State at their disposal, which can magnify massively the arena of consequence of poor judgment. Think of it like this: Which is the greater threat? The drunk, or the drunk behind the wheel of a large lorry?

Jeb!’s (admittedly hypothetical) response to a sci-fi philosophical question does however manifest the belief structure of the man.

This complacency is dangerous, especially in a politician, because it shows a cavalier disregard to the unforeseen consequences of an action—and in the case of laws, consequences are normally always created when in the attempt of changing people’s behavior.

There are many reasons to believe that killing Baby Hitler would simply result in another dictator coming to power — one perhaps who would kill even more people. Jeb!’s own existence now rests on temporally thin ice, because using his own logic, one would then be morally empowered to go back in time to eliminate Baby Jeb! for the same reason he would eliminate Baby Hitler. One can readily see the forming of a spiral of temporal distortion, as runaway unintended consequences multiply and spread ever out of control.

I humbly offer this as a better response for any Catholic aspirant to the White House: “As a public servant, I do not believe in instigating any course of action unless I can know and evaluate all of the consequences (both visible and hidden) that such a policy will have further down the line. With this hypothetical question, I cannot know what the future consequences of this action will be to the space-time continuum. But I do know that the deliberate killing of an innocent child is always murder — and one can never do something that is morally wrong just because one intends to bring about a greater good.”

The great tragedy of the modern era is that we lack statesmen who know to weigh all of the consequences—both seen and unseen, as the great Frédérick Bastiat instructed—in considering a potential course of action.