Comments by "John Roberts" (@view1st) on "Economics Explained" channel.

  1. With a single party ruling Japan these last 85 years I don't think your can call it a full democracy. Another thing is the regime didn't happen; the same people who ruled Japan pre-war were pretty much the same people post‐war. You know why? Because your oh‐so-democratic USA didn't want Japanese communists and socialists to use democracy to get to power put most of the pre-war leadership back in power.
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  2. ​ @tameralzoubi6664  And aid was only given after the USA had entered the war and at no time before. As long as they thought that Germany would smash Soviet communism they were quite happy to provide Germany with aid. Same with D Day: only when the Soviet Union looked as if it was going to take the whole of Europe did the USA commit to an invasion of France.
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  3.  @randacnam7321  So you honestly think the Chinese government are just building all this high speed transport infrastructure for the sake of it?
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  4.  @Lordskipper1910  I think he means that denigrating a country that invests heavily in infrastructure that then leads to stupendous economic growth and a year‐on‐year increase in the standard of living is a bit, shall we say, petty and smacks of jealousy, especially coming from a country that is not investing nearly as much.
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  5. In a nutshell. The USA and Great Britain have their priorities wrong (Australia too)
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  6. ​ @Alaryk111  they have industrial policies but only in so far as the United States and their own capitalist corporations and banks will allow. Solely for profit capitalism tends not to go in for long term planning, nor the needs of the planet or its people.
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  7. China has lifted 1 billon people out of absolute poverty since 1949. I wonder how many people have been lifted out of poverty by profit‐driven laissez-faire capitalism.
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  8. Absolutely spot on! 🫡
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  9.  @StuffandThings_  NATO war games say otherwise. On its border regions Russia is almost always likely to win. The same goes for China in the South China Sea.
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  10. The European Union will last as long as the United States wants it to. And China.
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  11. If the EU breaks up it will more likely be due to politics rather than economics.
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  12. The video maker has a typical capitalist mindset: profit; the enrichment of the capitalist ownership class.
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  13. This Australian neo-fascist — sorry, centre-right conservative moderate (centre-left liberal?) — will be telling us that Russian dictators are closing down the West's pipelines and embargoing it's oil and gas next (even though it's the West, at the behest of the USA, who are doing it to themselves).
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  14. But isn't that the very reason why western corporations go to China in the first place, because of the lack of safety standards and the cheap labour? Your argument, rather than showing up how bad China is, actually merely serves to show how bad capitalism is.
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  15. At issue is the fact that the USA (which is what we really mean when we say 'the West') wants things the Chinese have, it doesn't, and has nothing much to the Chinese want in exchange. Pretty much like Britain at the beginning of the 19th century. It wanted Chinese wares but the Chinese only wanted silver in exchange. Britain was going bankrupt because of the outflow of silver and decided it would be better if it went down the imperial route and forced it at gunpoint to accept whatever Britain was willing to offer (initially opium). This time around I don't think sending gunboats up the Yantze is going to cut it. The USA/The West either competes with China on its own terms or goes into decline and becomes an economic backwater in comparison.
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  16. Tell that to all those people who have polluted water supplies caused by fracking (Flint, Michigan) or oil pipelines built across Native American reservations.
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  17. The Australians are doing the same with their own quarantine camps, only they aren't evening bothering to build anything, they're just housing people in tents.
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  18. As does Israel. Britian. France. Spain. Italy. Why, even Germany I'm sure would be able to if it this time around.
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  19. Because it seems to be aimed at a North American audience.
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  20. Yeah, worked well with Japan in 1941.
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  21.  @CMVBrielman  What was meant is that the sanctions on Japan are the very reason it attacked Pearl Harbour. So unless what you're saying is that the USA deliberately provoking Japan into attacking them so that it could use that as a pretext to enter into a war not only with Japan but with Germany as well (they were allies) then no, from that perspective it didn't work out very well. If there had been no sanctions on Japan the war in the Pacific might not have taken place and lives may have been saved. History would undoubtedly have been different. Of course, on the other hand, from the perspective of a nascent military‐industrial complex and a country with a messianic complex hellbent on global hegemony that believed its time as an empire had finally come it did indeed work out very well; from the perspective of warmongers. This time around, however, we have nuclear bombs to consider as well as nuclear winter so provoking Russia and China is not that good an idea.
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  22. The United Kingdom is still de facto in the Union even if on paper it is not. And it's my bet that we will formally rejoin at some time in the not too distant future, probably on less favourable terms. And our withdrawal was probably due in part to the influence of the USA.
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  23. Sour grapes much...!
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  24. And that's why the West, the USA which controls the aforementioned financial institutions in particular, fears China.
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  25. And when the West was developing... did it care for the feelings of its people or the environment? Were the western European monarchies of Austro‐Hungary and Hohenzollern authoritarian or liberal democracies?
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