Death by Liberalism: The Fatal Outcome of Well-Meaning Liberal Policies - Hardcover

Dunn, J. R.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0061873802 ISBN 13: 9780061873805

Publisher: Broadside Books, 2011

Synopsis

Center-right conservative author J. R. Dunn offers a cogent analysis of how liberalism has not only failed as an ideology but has proven fatal to citizens and societies around the world. Dunn’s piercing analysis of the Obama administration’s perilous public policy agenda is a provocative, must-read rallying cry for Tea Party adherents, fans of Ann Coulter and Jonah Goldberg, or anyone concerned about the left’s deadly impact on the future.

About this title

About the Author

J. R. Dunn is the author of three novels, This Side of Judgment, Days of Cain, and Full Tide of Night, and his work has been published in various magazines and anthologies. He has been an associate editor of The International Military Encyclopedia since 1992, and is now a contributing editor for American Thinker.

From the Back Cover

More Americans have been killed by well-meaning liberal policies than by all the wars of the last century combined. J. R. Dunn not only analyzes the unintended consequences of liberal policies, but argues that these consequences have resulted in millions of fatalities in the United States and around the world.

Liberalism sees itself as a rational and helpful philosophy that seeks to use the benign power of the government to improve our safety, health, and general welfare. In doing so, it relies on the authority of experts to devise the most rational means of realizing these goals. Unfortunately, when these well-meaning plans go awry, as they too often do, the results can be disastrous, even deadly. As J. R. Dunn persuasively argues in this thoroughly documented book, death by liberalism occurs in all fields and at all levels of society. Motorists, workers, even children taken under the state's protection—all have fallen victim to liberal policies. What's more, the numbers are staggering. Liberalism can be implicated in the deaths of hundreds of thousands in this country, and millions worldwide.

Dunn's detailed and deliberative account takes no cheap shots but relies on well-established facts to show liberalism's fatal consequences in numerous aspects of our lives—from crime and abortion to fuel-efficiency standards and the banning of DDT, from gun control to urban renewal. Dunn also pinpoints areas in which liberal interventions in the making are likely to produce more suffering and death, such as legal euthanasia, and identifies some of the leading liberals—including George Soros—behind the spread of these lethal initiatives.

Reviews

Dunn, a novelist and military encyclopedist, indicts liberals for interventionist big-government policies that have sparked "mass negligent homicide." He finds fault with fuel-efficiency standards that promote unsafe small cars, environmental regulations protecting mountain lions, and the phase-out of ozone-depleting chloro-fluorocarbons. The author makes a cogent case against several misguided government policies, from destructive urban renewal schemes to asbestos-abatement hysteria, but inflates the particulars into an attack on liberal "rationalism," the desire to use reason to solve human problems and a refusal to acknowledge that "this is not a universe governed by logic." Insufficient citations and such claims as "no one goes without care" in the U.S." sap the book's authority and might well prevent Dunn's own "well-meaning" arguments from finding wider credence. (Jan.)
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Despite humane principles aimed at advancing rights and providing for basic human needs, liberalism has actually harmed more than helped the helpless and needy, argues Dunn, a commentator for the center-right website American Thinker. Dunn highlights the history of liberal impulses back to the Founding Fathers and earlier, and he pinpoints when modern liberalism went astray, taking on ever more social issues and developing government policies to cure them. In the U.S., liberalism went wrong with the New Deal, when it transformed itself from principles to ideology. According to Dunn, liberal policies have led to rising crime, increased abortion, and other social ills that have triggered unintended consequences and led to the deaths and suffering of thousands. To construct cautionary examples of government overreaching to improve general welfare, Dunn draws parallels with benign government policies gone wrong in Nazi Germany, the USSR, the People’s Republic of China, and other nations not generally considered to have much in common with the U.S. While Dunn’s claims are a bit outrageous—for virtually any political ideology will lead to unintended harm—his perspective is interesting. --Vanessa Bush

Edition details

• Publisher: Broadside Books
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0061873802
• ISBN 13: 9780061873805
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320