40 quotes
Freedom produces wealth and prosperity.
The Blue Book of Freedom: Ending Famine, Poverty, Democide, and War (2007)
Libertarian states have no violence between themselves. The more libertarian two states, the less their mutual violence. The more libertarian a state, the less its foreign violence.
There is a good reason that all of this killing is unknown. The authoritarian and totalitarian thug regimes that do most of the killing usually control who writes their histories and what appears in them.
The Blue Book of Freedom: Ending Famine, Poverty, Democide, and War (2007)
In the twentieth century, governments murdered, as a prudent estimate, 272,000,000 men, women and children. It could be over 400,000,000.
The Blue Book of Freedom: Ending Famine, Poverty, Democide, and War (2007)
The citizens of democracies are the least likely to be murdered by their own government; the citizens of totalitarian, especially Marxist systems, the most likely.
Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder since 1917 (1990)
What is the democratic peace? In the literature on or referring to the democratic peace, this means the idea or fact that democracies do not (or virtually never) make war on each other.
Possibly 20,000,000 were killed in the war against the Nazis and from Nazi occupation, but many more millions were killed in Stalin’s simultaneous war on his own people.
Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder since 1917 (1990)
It is sad that hundreds of thousands of people can be killed by governments with hardly an international murmur, while a war killing several thousand people can cause an immediate world outcry and global reaction.
Increasing freedom in the world decreases the death toll of its wars. Surely, whatever reduces and then finally ends the scourge of war in our history, without causing a greater evil, must be the greatest moral good. And this is freedom.
The Blue Book of Freedom: Ending Famine, Poverty, Democide, and War (2007)
The theory is that democratic systems provide a path to peace, and universalizing them would eliminate war and minimize global, political violence
Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder since 1917 (1990)
The less free the people within any two nations are, the bloodier and more destructive the war between them; the greater their freedom, the less likely such wars occur. Free people do not make war on each other.
The Blue Book of Freedom: Ending Famine, Poverty, Democide, and War (2007)
I conclude that nobody can be trusted with unlimited power. The more power a regime has, the more likely people will be killed. This is a major reason for promoting freedom.
Rudolph Rummel Talks About the Miracle of Liberty and Peace (1997)
Since advancing freedom of the press furthers democracy, spreading freedom of the press promotes world peace. And the reverse logic is also true. Without democracies, there will be war; without freedom of the press, democracies cannot exist.
We have a solution for war. It is to expand the sphere of liberty.
Rudolph Rummel Talks About the Miracle of Liberty and Peace (1997)
In total, communist (Marxist-Leninist) regimes murdered nearly 148 million people from 1917 to 1987. For a perspective on this incredible toll, note that all domestic and foreign wars during the twentieth century killed in combat around 41 million.
The Blue Book of Freedom: Ending Famine, Poverty, Democide, and War (2007)
In practice, Marxism has meant bloody terrorism, deadly purges, lethal prison camps and murderous forced labor, fatal deportations, man-made famines, extrajudicial executions and fraudulent show trials, outright mass murder and genocide.
Political scientists almost everywhere have promoted the expansion of government power. They have functioned as the clergy of oppression.
Rudolph Rummel Talks About the Miracle of Liberty and Peace (1997)
Recall that democratic regimes in an exchange society are at one corner of the political triangle while totalitarian regimes with the coercive society they have constructed are at another. They therefore are at opposing ends of one side of the triangle, which is a continuum ranging from Freedom to Power.
Power Kills: Democracy as a Method of Nonviolence (1997)
The more constrained the power of governments, the more it is diffused, checked and balanced, the less it will aggress on others and commit democide. At the extremes of Power, totalitarian communist governments slaughter their people by the tens of millions, while many democracies can barely bring themselves to execute even serial murderers.
Death by Government (1994)
In sum, theoretical and empirical research establishes that democratic civil liberties and political rights promote nonviolence and is a path to a warless world. The clearest evidence of this is that there has never been a war between well-established democracies, while numerous wars have occurred between all other political systems;…
Power Kills: Democracy as a Method of Nonviolence (1997)