From Thomas Sowell in 2014:
Liberals advocate many wonderful things. In fact, I suspect that most conservatives would prefer to live in the kind of world envisioned by liberals, rather than in the kind of world envisioned by conservatives.
Unfortunately, the only kind of world that any of us can live in is the world that actually exists. Trying to live in the kind of world that liberals envision has costs that will not go away just because these costs are often ignored by liberals.
Ah, what an opening!
…
Liberals can be disarming. In fact, they are for gun control at home or international disarmament agreements.
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?
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.
International disarmament agreements flourished between the two World Wars. Just a few years after the end of the First World War there were the Washington Naval Agreements of 1921-1922 that led to the United States actually sinking some of its own warships.
Then there was the celebrated Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, in which nations renounced war, with France’s Foreign Minister Aristide Briand declaring, “Away with rifles, machine guns, and cannon!” The “international community” loved it.
In Britain, the Labour Party repeatedly voted against military armaments during most of the decade of the 1930s. A popular argument of the time was that Britain should disarm “as an example to others.”
Unfortunately, Hitler did not follow that example. He was busy building the most powerful military machine on the continent of Europe.
Nor did Germany or Japan allow the Washington Naval Agreements to cramp their style. The fact that Britain and America limited the size of their battleships simply meant that Germany and Japan had larger battleships when World War II began.
What is happening in Ukraine today is just a continuation of the old story about nations that disarm increasing the chances of being attacked by nations that do not disarm.
Any number of empirical studies about domestic gun control laws tell much the same story.
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.
Read the rest here…
In other words:
“If we have a strong army, countries which fear our army might attack us. Disarming, we remove that risk.”
(Of course, there is much more to say about Ukraine\Russia.)
