The Swiss Are Sensible…Even in the French-Speaking Cantons

June 20, 2023 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

Last month (May), I wrote that Switzerland was the world’s best-governed nation, based on the latest Misery Index.

The month before that (April), I wrote about Switzerland ranking #1 in the Human Freedom Index.

And the month before that (March), I wrote about the ongoing success of the country’s spending cap.

This small country gets a lot of attention because it is a role model.

It has a wide range of good policies (low taxes, private retirement savings, federalism, etc), but it also has very sensible people.

The Swiss have opportunities to engage in direct democracy, and over and over and over again they make sensible choices.

And it just happened again. Voters in Geneva were just asked whether they wanted to increase the Canton’s wealth tax.

Bastian Benrath of Bloomberg reported on the conclusive rejection of the class-warfare scheme.

Geneva voters rejected a “solidarity” tax hike for the richest 1% living in Switzerland’s second-largest city. The measure failed with 55.12% of people voting against, according to final government results published on Sunday. The plan to temporarily lift the wealth tax from 1% to 1.5% for individuals with assets worth more than 3 million francs ($3.4 million) -— proposed by a coalition of leftist lawmakers, unions and activists… Business groups had also warned that the city’s richest inhabitants might move to neighboring states with lower rates. This had happened in Norway, where a wealth-tax increase to between 1% and 1.1% — notably lower than that proposed in Geneva — spurred millionaires to leave the country. Cantonal wealth-tax data show more than 19,000 of Geneva’s about 500,000 inhabitants reach the millionaire threshold. A smaller number, somewhere between 4,200 and 10,000, would have been affected by the proposal.

By the way, it’s not just Geneva voters that reject class warfare. The entire nation overwhelmingly voted against class-warfare proposals in 2010 and 2021.

Nonetheless, the French-speaking part of Switzerland leans to the left (at least by Swiss standards), so I was relieved that the people of Geneva made the right choice.

Maybe they did learn the right lesson from what happened in Norway. Too bad we can’t say the same about voters in Massachusetts.

P.S. Needless to say, it is disappointing that a wealth tax exists in such a sensible nation.