I'm guessing that, as this is a political forum, most of you have already seen this ad set in a fictional future Beijing.
Don't worry if you haven't; I'll link a YouTube version of it 'below the fold'.
In the video, a college professor / Justin Bieber headset user tells his class of the failings of past civilizations and empires, and the folly of America. Specifically: how stimuluses lead to us becoming their bitches, and how healthcare is a baaad thing. The usual conservative talking points. So I'm going to go through this scaremongering piece of crap, methodically, and dismantle it using something we Liberals and Progressives like to call facts.
More below the fold...
First of all, as promised, the video.
Ooooh. SCARY!! Scalpel, please.
Why do great nations fail? The Ancient Greeks, the Roman Empire, the British Empire, and the United States of America. They all made the same mistakes...
Waaaaiiiit for iiiit...
...turning back on their principles that made them great.
The Greeks were notorious for their disability to unite as a nation.
"At no time in antiquity was Greece a unified nation in the modern sense" (Nardo, Don (2001). 'The Decline and Fall of Ancient Greece', pp. 12. ISBN 07-37-70241-9).
So I guess their failure as a nation is for the same reason that my marriage to Mila Kunis failed. It never existed in the first place.
There now follows a gratuitous image of Mila Kunis.
Gratuitous image of Mila Kunis.
So not much in the way of national principles there. The Romans were taken over by the Ostrogoths who considered themselves upholders of the direct line of Roman traditions, as they were at the time they took Rome (so why didn't the Ostrogoths fail immediately because of those same principles?!?). The Pirenne Thesis notes the barbarians came to Rome not to destroy it, but to take part in its benefits, and thus they tried to preserve the Roman way of life. The notion of Rome falling once the barbarians were at the gates is very Edward Gibbon-esque, very "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" which was being written before America was a nation. An outdated, surpassed text both now and (we assume) in the year 2030.
Britain's Empire was the largest of the lot. Covering one-quarter of the world's population in 1922 (Maddison, Angus (2001). 'The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development', pp. 98, 242. ISBN 92-64-18654-9 ...you see, THAT'S how a historian would cite facts!). So how did it "fail"? What were its "mistakes"? I'm going to copypasta a bit from Wikipedia here. It's good reading.
In September 1982, the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher travelled to Beijing to negotiate with the Chinese government on the future of Britain's last major and most populous overseas territory, Hong Kong. Under the terms of the 1842 Treaty of Nanking, Hong Kong Island itself had been ceded to Britain "in perpetuity", but the vast majority of the colony was constituted by the New Territories, which had been acquired under a 99 year lease in 1898, due to expire in 1997. Thatcher, seeing parallels with the Falkland Islands, initially wished to hold Hong Kong and proposed British administration with Chinese sovereignty, though this was rejected by China. A deal was reached in 1984âunder the terms of the Sino-British Joint Declaration, Hong Kong would become a special administrative region of the People's Republic of China, maintaining its way of life for at least 50 years. The handover ceremony in 1997 marked for many, including Charles, Prince of Wales who was in attendance, "the end of Empire"
In summary: the Conservative government oversaw the end of the empire. But they did it by handing back land to the native people. As with the 1982 Canada Act, passed by the British parliament, ending the need for British involvement in changes to the Canadian constitution. And equivalent acts were passed for Australia and New Zealand in 1986. Apparently, giving independence is a failing. Being fair is somehow turning back on principles, something the British will tell you is still integral to their national identity and most definitely not a failing.
On with the video!
America tried to tax and spend itself out of a great recession.
Something that worked remarkably well in the 1930s. I'm sure we've all seen this graph.
...and more on spending out of a recession in just a second.
Enormous so-called "stimulus" spending, massive changes to healthcare, government takeovers of private industries, and crushing debt.
Here's where it gets interesting for our Professor of Revisionist History, but not in a good way for him. You see: an economics historian in 2030, especially one that knows about China, would know that America's stimulus was dwarfed by China's stimulus.
China's economic stimulus enacted and largely disbursed is already three to four times the size of the United States stimulus as a percentage of GDP.
Our stimulus was around 5% of our GDP. China? 20%. And who had the better recovery? China did.
Massive changes to healthcare, oh no! Except that our healthcare changes, if implemented, would save us hundreds of billions. A YEAR! And it wasn't the forming of the NHS in the UK in the 1940s that ended their Empire either. Other nations spend less on healthcare for better quality.
And we don't even HAVE an empire. And Britain is still a country, and it still has its Commonwealth. And (search my previous diaries), it was Wall Street that cried out for socialism. So. Much. Fail.
Our historian's grasp of "history" is very shaky indeed. An outside observer might say he's just parroting failed Republican talking points. So now we're down to the very last sentence. Just one sentence to go. One last chance to not end the season with a .000 batting average...
Of course, we owned most of their debt... so now they work for us.
Ooooh, and I had such high hopes. You see: in modern times (chart from 2007), foreign ownership of our debt stood at 25% of the total amount. And China's share of that one-fourth? Including Taiwan and Hong Kong (remember: that British handover), it's less than 6% of who owns our total debt.
So what have we learned? Well, not much from this quasi-future-historian. Nations that weren't nations, excuses and explanations that don't mention the full picture, or bear any relation to the facts. We can learn a few things about this video in the present, however.
We know the video is from Citizens Against Government Waste, a group that has campaigned on behalf of the tobacco industry in the past. In 1999 the New York Times had described CAGW as one of a number of "Microsoft-financed groups" because of their opposition to open source software (Microsoft's links to Ralph Reed and Jack Abramoff have been reported in the past). Alan Keyes was president of CAGW from 1989 to 1991. And past funding for the group has come from Exxon Corporation (now ExxonMobil) and tobacco giants Philip Morris.
And I haven't even addressed the racism in the video.
But even though it's so transparently lobbyist FUD, the debt is bad. So we should definitely avoid any ideology that makes that happen, right?
At least that's ONE thing we can all agree on.