Sowell: The High Cost of Liberalism: Part II

Liberals can be disarming. In fact, they are for disarming anybody who can be disarmed, whether domestically or internationally.

Unfortunately, the people who are the easiest to disarm are the ones who are the most peaceful — and disarming them makes them vulnerable to those who are the least peaceful.

We are currently getting a painful demonstration of that in Ukraine. When Ukraine became an independent nation, it gave up all the nuclear missiles that were on its territory from the days when it had been part of the Soviet Union.

At that time, Ukraine had the third largest arsenal of nuclear weapons in the world. Do you think Putin would have attacked Ukraine if it still had those nuclear weapons? Or do you think it is just a coincidence that nations with nuclear weapons don't get invaded?

Among those who urged Ukraine to reduce even its conventional, non-nuclear weapons as well, was a new United States Senator named Barack Obama. He was all for disarmament then, and apparently even now as President of the United States. He has refused Ukraine's request for weapons with which to defend itself.

As with so many things that liberals do, the disarmament crusade is judged by its good intentions, not by its actual consequences.

Indeed, many liberals seem unaware that the consequences could be anything other than what they hope for. That is why disarmament advocates are called "the peace movement."

Whether disarmament has in fact led to peace, more often than military deterrence has, is something that could be argued on the basis of the facts of history — but it seldom is.

Liberals almost never talk about disarmament in terms of evidence of its consequences, whether they are discussing gun control at home or international disarmament agreements.

Sowell is a treasure:

“If in fact tighter gun control laws reduced the murder rate, that would be the liberals’ ace of trumps. Why then do the liberals not play their ace of trumps, by showing us such hard facts? Because they don’t have any such hard facts. So they give us lofty rhetoric and outraged indignation instead.”

Indeed. Instead they say stupid things like: England has strict gun control, and has less murders with guns than the United States.

It is the “More Hospitals, More Hospital Deaths” fallacy”

Scholarly studies have found that the more hospitals that exist in a country, the more people die in hospitals. This alarming conclusion shows that the United States, with the highest number of hospitals, has the most people die in hospitals. Countries with few hospitals have few die in them, a country fortunate enough to be without hospitals would have no one die in a hospital.

It is especially alarming that the largest hospitals, that contain the greatest number of patients, have the largest number of deaths per hospital.

This leads to the inescapable conclusion that we should ban hospitals in order to prevent hospital deaths, and that the largest hospitals should be the first ones banned.

http://gunwatch.blogspot.com/2012/12/more-hospitals-more-hospital-deaths.html

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