I don't think you can plausibly claim that the US was a leader in technology until the 20th century, which is long after the US started having enormous amounts of immigration.
It is insane that the people responsible for policing drugs get to decide what drugs are illegal. That's like letting the police decide if something is a crime or not. It's completely antithetical to democracy and the rule-of-law.
By the time violins existed, then you are already 100+ years into the modern era and much of this article no longer applies.
Centralized states were becoming much more common and developing much more administrative capacity. Literate bureaucrats were much more easily available. Economic surpluses were much larger. Directly recruiting, equipping and paying an army became much more practical than it previously was and the other methods described here were no longer as necessary as they previously were.
Still "subject to the jurisdiction of". US law doesn't currently have a law allowing them to be conscripted, and it would be very ill-advised to do so and it would cause a lot of diplomatic backlash, but it certainly could pass such a law if it chose to.
Sparta is quite possibly the pinnacle of horribleness for civilization, which is why I think they emphasized that it particularly was a slave society (80%+ slaves and a majority of the remainder were non-citizens).
It's a fool's errand to try to prevent criticism to that extent. It's mostly harmless and functions as a release valve for people's frustrations and helps to stop them from doing something more extreme than just complaining.
It's also possibly illegal to stop them. Employees in the US have a legal right to talk to each other about their working conditions and employers are not allowed to stop them. Most companies aren't above violating that law, but they want to save that for actual union-busting, not to stop people from sharing memes.
Fortunately insolvency in this scenario mean that they will only be able to afford to pay around 3/4 of promised benefits.
Closing that budget gap is a problem that will need to be dealt with, but it's not impossible to fix and it's a fairly long way away. There are a lot of proposals going around for how to fix it and those will become more politically palatable as it gets closer.
That might have as much to do with their insane system for choosing a Doge, which many historians think did a lot to force compromise and reduce corruption.
They took the full council, selected a random subset, had that group choose another group from the full council by voting, then repeat that random selection followed by voting another few times ending with a final group who voted to select a Doge.
This appears to be using "government" in American English sense, where "government" refers to anyone who works for the state in any capacity, including courts, not just the executive.