To what degree are authoritarian, or Illegitimate, governments responsible for the crimes or actions of its citizens?

Of course not, but a government – citizen relationship isn’t a parent – child relationship.

I’m still not really sure when, unless it’s something obvious, like not enacting the New Deal during the depression definitely would’ve led to people dying and comitting crime to eat.

The government is for all people. It was established with its rules and regulations, so that you and I could be free to do, work and say what we please.

The eye of crimes is not within the government to effect the people. It’s the people that use the government and commit crimes against each other, that’s a major factor, not the government.

The government has its own internal problems and this is caused chiefly because of its workers and not outside people, many of the times.

The government does not send out letters and telling people to rob their neighborhood bank, in order to be self-sufficent. If there is such a letter, I would like to see it.

@john65pennington I’m sure their was such letters in 1939–1945 Germany about treating groups that the government disliked… I belive their was even a few movies, and speeches and eventually laws.

They are responsible for creating an environment in which crime can flourish.

I haven’t traced back the antecedent of the question, but I stand on one principle: People are fully and always responsible for their own deliberate actions, or for initiating action that spins out of their control. So a drunk is responsible for drinking and for whatever he does while drunk, regardless of his attempts to shrug off bad behavior as “the actions of a drunk”. A driver in a snowstorm is responsible for a collision that occurs due to his loss of control of the vehicle. Whether that is a crime or not depends more on his state of mind: was he driving recklessly, or was he simply caught in a moment of bad road, bad vision, bad conditions and whatever else contributes to “an accident”?

Regardless of laws that governments pass, we’re responsible for our own actions in living under those laws, those governments.

So if the Nazi government makes a law that says “Jews are subhuman and should be exterminated,” then I would be guilty of a crime if I went along with that and participated in the extermination by my own deliberate actions. A case could be made that one is not “guilty” of acts that one is coerced into – and then we need to describe what constitutes “coercion”: loss of a job and salary? extermination of one’s own self or family? somewhere in between? Likewise, those marked for extermination under such a regime would not be guilty of crimes if they had to rob and kill simply to defend their own lives or families against “legal” thieves and killers.

Would it be a crime to live as a German citizen, to know what my government was doing to other humans with my tacit consent, and do nothing to stop that, but accept the other benefits of being a German (non-Jewish) citizen? There’s a question. I don’t have an answer for that one yet.

Human beings never lose their own personal responsibility. We always have a choice. We do not have to do what the government wants us to do. We can takes the consequences instead.