best regime ever

best regime according to you?


  • Total voters
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What's YOUR favourite regime on moral/social/political grounds in the history of mankind and, if you wanna debate, why? Keep well in mind, while reading the choices, to make a comparison not between each of them and the others in the list, but between them and their contemporary regimes elsewhere.
 
England in XIX century. Yes, I've read Dickens... but I also remember, that one of suspected in case of Jack the Ripper sued - and won - Scotland Yard for groundless arresting (no, he WASN'T from uppre class... he was shoemaker or someone)
Seems as it's standard ureachable even in modern Europe.

And I never-ever would vote for Incan totalitarism
 
I may be voted out of the Jingoistic American Nationalist Society, but I voted for Scandinavian Social Democracy. I have problems with the high level of government interference and low level of religiousity in modern Scandinavia, but in many respects these societies are more "Christian" in the sense of trying to organize a society around the basic "love your neighbor" ethical precepts of Christ than the highly competitive, individualistic, and materialistic USA - which of the choices given would be my second (New Deal/WW2 era) and third (Modern) choices.

For ones not on the list that are my emotional faves, I'd go with late 19th century/early 20th century British Empire, Wilhelmine Germany, or early (tolerant) Islam.

Realistically, almost any reasonably tolerant industrialized mid 20th to 21st century society provides so much in the way of medical care, public health, personal safety and political/social freedom that they would outweigh any earlier epoch as places
 
I second zoomar on the emotional faves. Sure, it had a large, dark underbelly, but the british empire at its peak just has an emotional appeal...
 
In my book, Scandinavia wins hands down., I was at an SCA event near Stockholm in November. It was held at a school. A bog-standard village-level suburban middle school. Crikes, my university doesn't look that good.

It's their priorities

Volker

PS: Though I'd probably have tried to join the the ICS, and liked it.
 
I'm probably going to be ranted at from the right and left, but I'd lump the Scandinavians/Brits/and both US into the same catagory of "Western Democracies". To be sure, they differ a lot in the details, but all of them have the basics of democracy, election of leaders, free economies, freedom of speech/religion/etc. There are a lot of places that don't......
 
I would have voted for "new deal" america but unless someone tested this without a depresion going on i can't really make a decision.
 
I voted for New Deal for being my emotional favorite, but Scandanavian Social Democracy makes me turn green with envy. :-/
 
In my view, the best regime ever was probably the United States prior to the American Civil War. Yes, it had it's faults (slavery, for example), but the average citizen of the United States at that time was probably freer than the citizen of any other regime ever, before or since. The only contact the average person in the United States prior to 1861 had with the national government was through the Post Office, and the State governments were only marginally more intrusive in people's ordinary lives. How many other regimes could say the same? Not too many, to be sure. If the Civil War had been avoided and the slavery problem had been allowed to work itself out naturally, the United States today would probably be the most libertarian country in the world.
 
I voted for "Other", and I'm sure I don't need to tell you what I have in mind, although I'd have to rate late 19th early 20th c Britain pretty high, too.
 
robertp6165 said:
In my view, the best regime ever was probably the United States prior to the American Civil War. Yes, it had it's faults (slavery, for example), but the average citizen of the United States at that time was probably freer than the citizen of any other regime ever, before or since.

Unless you were a woman or black or something crazy like that. :rolleyes:
 
"Unless you were a woman or black or something crazy like that"

Opposing modern-day statism and regulation does not necessarily make one nostalgic for slavery, women not being able to vote, etc, regardless of how often the Left likes to say that.

One of the customer reviews for G. Gordon Liddy's "When I Was a Kid, This Was a Free Country," makes the same argument. See:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/t...f=sr_1_1/104-2280424-0452763?v=glance&s=books

If slavery was ended peaceably, a lot of the Jim Crow BS probably would not have happened (it would have been voluntary instead of being forced-upon after a long and vicious war). And women could vote in most of the US just before the 19th Amendment was passed; women were barred from voting only along the East Coast and in the Deep South.

That argument is like saying those who oppose Communism AUTOMATICALLY endorse Czarist-era pogroms, the Taliban, Augusto Pinochet, etc.
 
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