On Force (3)

Here is a much more pragmatic argument against Obamacare.

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These last few posts on force versus choice have reminded me of a common political philosophy argument that one of the skills of government is to legitimately control a monopoly of the use of force in a certain geographical district.

But, if you look back at the history of man, it was never serial killers who have struck any real fear into any large group of people.

Here are the top 3 serial killers (and the number of proven victims):

Harold Shipman (218)
Luis Alfredo Garavito (138)
Pedro Alonso Lopez (110)


While here are the top 3 governmental killing groups (and number of victims):

Soviet Russia (61,911,000)
Communist China (35,236,000)
Nazi Germany (20,946,000)

*Note: These numbers are talking about people killed by their own government, not on a battlefield.

Parsing the numbers, it would take 283,995 Harold Shipman copycats to accomplish what Soviet Russia did.


As Sheppard Book quoted from Captain Malcolm Reynolds and I would add to, "A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned" in their ability to kill large numbers of people.