Tag: Switzerland

Categories
moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies responsibility too much government

Sit, UBI, Sit: Play Dead

Swiss, Switzerland, UBI, Universal Basic Income, socialism, robots, illustration

This weekend, the Swiss people rejected the idea of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) with a whopping 77 percent against.

That’s the kind of overwhelming result that one finds in America for, say, term limits. And 23 percent, you might notice, is about the percentage of the population in America of hard-​core “liberal” progressives, the kind of people usually in support of such measures.

In Switzerland’s case, it was a measure put on the ballot by one group, Bien-​CH. But if you are thinking “socialism,” the group insists that that’s the wrong way to think about the plan. UBI is needed, the group’s website says, “to grease the wheels of the capitalist economies” facing a declining need for workers as a result of technological advance.

Yes, UBI is a policy designed to accommodate the coming horde of robots! How? By “increasing demand” by spreading out wealth from the connected-​to-​tech few to the witless-​about-​tech many. (How vulgar Keynesian.)

The Swiss government urged a No vote, fearing a need to raise taxes by fifty percent. Quite a hike.

Meanwhile, the notion garners worldwide interest, and even libertarian social scientist Charles Murray promotes this guaranteed income idea (under a different initialism), mostly to streamline the costly bulk of the welfare state.

I’m dubious.

After all, about our latest industrial revolution, in artificial intelligence and in robotics: I say open up labor and entrepreneurial markets from excessive regulation, and allow networking advances to transform capitalism on its own terms, with person-​to-​person (P2P) cooperation (think AirBnB and Uber and Lyft) and much more.

The best is coming, I bet. If clunky proposals like UBI don’t get in the way.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Swiss, Switzerland, UBI, Universal Basic Income, socialism, robots, illustration

 

Categories
free trade & free markets initiative, referendum, and recall national politics & policies

The 22 Franc Minimum Wage

Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly and 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney agree with America’s progressives: raising the minimum wage is common sense.

The Swiss had a chance to prove their solidarity with that notion yesterday, when they voted on whether to establish a minimum wage in the country, a rather high one of 4000 francs per month (something close to 22 francs per hour). They voted the proposal down.

Overwhelmingly. By over 76 percent.Frederic Bastiat's classic essay, What Is Seen and What Is Unseen

Unlike in America, this minimum wage would have affected a huge hunk of the population. One out of ten Swiss workers earns less than the proposed minimum. In America, only about a single percentage of workers earns close to the national minimum.

This matters, as Frédéric Bastiat clearly explained, because price regulations can have two effects: a loss of production, or none at all — “either hurtful or superfluous.” No effect, when the price floor (as in a minimum wage) is set lower than the level most prices are already at (or, for which workers already work). But when the price floor gets set higher, goods go off the market — with too-​high wage minimums, workers with low productivity cease to get hired.

Swiss voters could scarcely afford to risk the jobs of ten percent of the workforce.

In America, raising the minimum wage is usually a matter of sacrificing a few people (whom voters mostly don’t know — Bastiat’s “unseen”) while rejoicing in the higher wages of those workers retained (the “seen”).

In Switzerland, the government declared the down vote a victory for common sense.

Which it was.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall video

On the Road in South America, Part One

This week Paul Jacob is traveling down south — way down south. Here he reports from the Lima, Peru, airport, explaining what he’s up to:

If all goes according to plan, he’ll report a few more times while in South America, and after.

You can view this video in HD, here.

Categories
ideological culture

Alfred Nobel Rolls Over

The Nobel Committee, having whetted its appetite for absurdity with a long string of goofy Peace Prize Awards, especially but not limited to the 2009 award for Barack Obama (who had done nothing but get elected to earn it), went all the way by giving the 2012 award to the European Union.

Barack Obama went on to become a “war president,” even regularly picking targets for assassination by drone. So, could Europe continue the trend and head straight towards war?

Maybe. Last year, former French Prime Minister Alain Juppe warned that the unions debt crisis could lead to “the explosion of the European Union itself,” and warned of growing nationalism. And violent unrest.

Dire warnings from former heads of state are one thing. Actual military movements are another. And Switzerland seems to be preparing for the worst:

The Swiss defense ministry told CNBC that it doesn’t rule out having to deploy troops in the coming years.

“It’s not excluded that the consequences of the financial crisis in Switzerland can lead to protests and violence,” a spokesperson told CNBC​.com. “The army must be ready when the police in such cases requests for subsidiary help.”

Talk about financial contagion!

Cooler heads may prevail, of course. Matthew Feeney, writing at reason​.com, notes that the “most obvious argument against the possibility of war is that there are no likely candidates for the part of aggressor.” And Europe hasn’t exactly been engaging in a massive military build-​up, unlike before the two world wars.

Alas, that doesn’t preclude massive rioting and uprisings.

Sovereign financial bankruptcy usually follows war, rather than preceding it. I guess that provides something like hope.

This is Common Sense. Im Paul Jacob.

Categories
tax policy

French Rolls

Jim Dixon, Kingsley Amis’s infamous Lucky Jim, put the logic of wealth redistribution in everyday terms: “If one man’s got ten buns and another’s got two, and a bun has got to be given up by one of them, then surely you take it from the man with ten buns.” Remarkably simple, leaving out, as it does,

  1. the making of buns;
  2. the effect of expropriating buns now on future bun production;
  3. trade in buns and
  4. consequent changes in ratios of bun ownership, sans expropriation;
  5. what effect the nabbing of buns has on the demand to take more buns in the future; and
  6. the necessity of taking buns in the first place (which Lucky Jim’s interlocutors noted).

Think about it longer than a minute, and it’s easy to see that the “soak-​the-​rich” plan quickly runs into trouble, one bit of difficulty neatly stated in the old adage often attributed to Margaret Thatcher: “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”

Sometimes you even run out of other people. As France may show next.

Socialists there have won the recent elections. They promise to reinstate the old, ugly wealth tax, as well as up the income tax on “the rich.” And so of course some of the richer French folks contemplate exile — at least as far as the welcoming cantons of Switzerland.

There are problems with this option, though. Under Sarkozy, the French government had instituted a whopping exit tax. But, if Mathieu van Berchem is to be believed, even this will prove “unlikely to stop any ‘exodus.’ There are often more reasons to leave than to stay, while the Socialist government could turn on the wealthy even more.”

If so, expect future French buns to have Swiss crosses stamped upon them.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom initiative, referendum, and recall

Swiss Gun Control

In mid-​February, Swiss voters rejected stricter gun controls.

No one knows how many guns the Swiss own. There’s no national registration system, yet the Swiss do not suffer a high crime rate, like America does.

But the country does have the highest gun suicide rate in Europe.

The stranger issue, though — and in contrast to most countries around the world — is the number of semi-​automatic rifles belonging to the army that soldiers and ex-​soldiers store at home. It’s part of the Swiss defense plan. The army can quickly rise up in case of an attack.

The gun control proposal would have required solders’ firearms to be locked up in armories. This, it was argued, was to help reduce suicide rates … though a few high-​profile shootings also gave impetus to the gun control measure. During the debate much was made of the country’s long history of firearm expertise and unique military heritage. 

The measure was defeated in 20 of Switzerland’s 26 cantons, with over 56 percent of voters rejecting it, nationwide. 

Does the Swiss system seem strange?

It’s certainly different.

Switzerland still uses conscripts, while the U.S. rightly recruits an all-​volunteer military. But their method of decentralized governance, borrowed more than 150 years ago from us and today far more decentralized than ours, is wise not only for the firepower of national defense, but for more bang for the buck in all areas of government. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.