Democide: When Govt Policies Kill

Who gets prosecuted when deaths occur because of bad laws and regulations? Prosecuted... are you kidding? Govt never even gets blamed for fatal screw ups.

The American Thinker has an illuminating piece titled Democide, which enumerated the failed policies and regulations that are responsible for the death of literally millions of people:

...We can add the CAFE standards, federal regulations dictating mileage rates for new cars. The only method of achieving the drastic new rates was by cutting automobile size and weight, increasing impact dangers to drivers and passengers. Studies by Harvard University and the Brookings Institution suggest that the numbers of ensuing deaths may exceed 120,000.

Then consider the mentally ill tossed out onto the streets unprepared and unsupervised as a money-saving measure beginning in the early 1970s. The aged veterans thrown out of VA hospitals today. The banning of halon, the single most effective fire retardant, with no suitable replacement. The children murdered while in the hands of state family-service agencies. (For an example of this type of atrocity, read this account of a young girl who escaped death by a whisker while agents of our government, paid for with our taxes, looked on.) AIDS policy, drug policy, immigration policy... we could fill a page with no more than the list itself. While the actual numbers remain hazy -- no one is keeping track, after all -- there can be no question that the death rate caused by government intervention is no less than horrifying.

Moving out into the world at large, we will examine the banning of DDT, implicated in the deaths of up to 30 million malaria victims -- most of them children. And the foreign policy initiatives so brightly informed by liberal idealism in such places as Vietnam, Cambodia, Nicaragua, Iran, and Zimbabwe. Now we're talking real numbers.

It will come as no news to readers of this site that liberal policies tend to fail. But some of them fail catastrophically. And when they do, they kill. They kill in large numbers. They have been killing for decades, and they will continue to kill for as long as we allow it.

The process is called democide, the murder of a populace by its own government. It can occur through malice, or indifference, or through incompetence. Almost always, it is instigated by an ideology -- fascism, Nazism, communism... and liberalism. According to Dr. R.J. Rummel, the sole scholar of democide (you'd think there would be droves of researchers working on such a critical topic -- but you'd be wrong), 262 million people have died by such means over the past century. Against that number, a half-million is a bagatelle, a drop in the bucket.

But it happened in our country. It happened in America.

Frightening, isn't it? And to think we may be at the point when more than half of us want more of these failed policies under the guise that Big Govt exists to provide for us.

My friend, M.E. (Stand in the Trenches,) rightly points out in my comment section that these numbers don't even include the 40 (or more) millions of abortions that have been performed since Roe v. Wade. The lives of our most vulnerable and innocent are being snuffed out in massive numbers year after year after year in the name of "women's health" and the "right to privacy" when in reality nothing short of infanticide has been and is taking place.

It's not time for more govt that creates, encourages and promotes the culture of death, it's time for govt be held to account for its destructive policies and regulations.

Be sure to read the entire piece and ask yourself if we can bear ever increasing govt programs and policies that kill.