Question of the Day #10: If You Could Be King
TV's Mr. Neil Permalink
12 comments
What would you do if you were king?
Discusseth.
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Wednesday, November 16, 2005
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12 Comments:
Abdicate.
I'd make everyone listen to HA ;)
Seriously though, I don't see alternatives creating as much progress as installing libertarianism.
I could forbid religion and make everyone take scientific and objectivism classes, but these things work better if they spread on their own merits at a natural speed.
I suppose I should have been more specific. I wouldn't want to be king either. I'm just asking what you would do, hypothetically, if you in inherited a kingship.
Let's say you were going to relinquish the throne. Is there anything you'd do prior to stepping down? Would you abolish the annointing of future kings? How would you introduce a new form of government?
Enjoy my harem. :-)
Have there been any forms of government in history that actually worked well?
I suppose if I had to rule as an absolute monarch, I'd follow my personal political practices- promoting freedom and justice as much as possible.
You can only please some of the people some of the time.
Of course there have been forms of government in history that have worked well. Countries like Norway and Sweden are doing all right. Even in the mideast, places like Bahrain and the UAE do well. I think ours works well, despite its occasional tendency to be overrun with extremist ideologues. The fact that there's so much dissent against Bush now simply shores up how well the system itself works, despite the attempts by various factions to take it over entirely. The checks and balances are still in place, and the thugs in office are unhappily finding themselves checked and balanced.
If your actual question is, "Have there been any forms of government in history that worked perfectly?" the answer is "Of course not." Human beings are imperfect by nature, and so any human effort, no matter how beneficial overall, will be riddled with imperfections. And everywhere you will get conflicting interests creating massive political tensions, especially in a society like America where people are allowed to have conflicting interests. A free republic that's a big fat mess is better any day than the alternatives. (Says this liberal.)
What are the reasons that Sweden, Norway, Bahrain, and UAE work well?
How do you even measure how a government works well?
I guess the word "work" is defined in veeeery different ways.
How do you measure if a government is working well? If its citizens are generally content and prosperous, that'd be about the best indicator, I'd say, and you see all those qualities in the countries I gave on my short list.
Of course, if that's the standard, then it ought to be said that the US government is not working well at the moment. But that's because the current administration is comprised of short-sighted, self-serving, incompetent and corrupt scumbags. Still, the machinery exists for it to work well in the future. Hopefully the votes next year will be more intelligently cast than they were in 04. Recent gubernatorial elections were a good sign.
I guess that's what gives me pause... is democracy a good idea when a country is full of idiots?
Content and prosperous ? How do you measure that ? You can't just pull this out of thin air. That's why in my little study I used objective statistics and compared them all globally.
Well, the first thing I do is declare the end of the War on Drugs.
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