A life spent living free is more joyous than a life spent living under the thumb of a brutal autocracy. But when free, besides having more life in your years, you also get more years of life. Experiments with restricting human freedom have been performed in places like Cambodia, China, Germany, and Russia. But look at the results:
The smallest recorded drop in life expectancy from lost freedom may merely be an artifact of sparse reporting: Germany only reported life expectancy in 1935 and then not again until 1946 — an 11-year hiatus of official recording-keeping which might otherwise show if government was shortening the life expectancy of its own citizens.
But government secrecy is a sign of lost freedom, and deaths should never be a secret.
Because of violent Communist revolution, Russia starts off with only 20 years of life expectancy and, because of the lost freedom associated with Communist regimes, life expectancy in Russia is still low — at 40-years of life expectancy — almost 30 years later (in 1947).
China lost a third of its 1958 life expectancy in just two years — due to Chairman Mao’s crackdown on the people, whom he blamed for the failures that were ironically associated with Communism, itself, not the people. But nowhere on Earth was Communism more fully implemented than in Cambodia, by the Khmer Rouge.
The Killing Fields
Cambodia was a small-enough country that it was possible for a Communist crackdown on every living person — fully-eradicating the black markets, where people might have tried to trade with one another, freely, to mutual benefit. The result of that — i.e., of losing 75% of their life-expectancy-at-birth — shows in the graph:
A life-expectancy at birth of just 12 years
(before you die of starvation, or the Communist government kills you)
The Rwandan genocide is added for a contrast to the lost freedom in Cambodia. Notice how a policy of rampant, blood-soaked genocide in Rwanda produced approximately the same effect on life expectancy as what you see when Communism is fully-implemented in a nation small-enough where it can be fully-implemented.
Soft Coup
But lately, the USA has been losing freedom at a dramatic rate, with attempts at lockdowns and mandates and “vaccine passports” and a general disdain for human life by government officials which had only been foreshadowed by the series: The Man in the High Castle. And check out how the USA compares with Communist China now:
Hundreds of millions of American citizens had their individual rights violated by the government during COVID. Ever since 2020, life expectancy in the USA is below what you find in a Communist country (China). The Land of Opportunity? Not during COVID. Small business was killed, elderly were killed, our very dignity was killed.
People were left to die.
The current governance in the USA is the worst that it has ever been in the history of the USA. The only other time in recorded history when we lost 18+ years of prior gains in life expectancy is back in 1918 (i.e., WWI + Spanish Flu).
And it also shows that freedom matters not just to the fulfillment that you get from life, but also to the number of years of life you get to have to begin with. Do not allow officials and bureaucrats to worsen matters even more by implementing any type of a Great Reset which results in even more lost control from the local level.
A push toward world government is a push into the grave.