Let's look at a country with high gun ownership, privatized healthcare, and no minimum wage. [View all]

[Recursion]

I'm talking, of course, of Switzerland.

Switzerland is making the Internet rounds right now after an excellent piece on Vox by Chantal Panozzo comparing Swiss and American work culture, and how she never wants to work in the US again. Having worked in Europe I sympathize.

Switzerland has no legal minimum wage. (I'll get to what it does have below.) Switzerland has a health care system much like the ACA in which everyone must purchase private insurance with subsidies based on income. Switzerland has the fourth-highest rate of gun ownership per capita in the world. Finance makes up 11% of the Swiss GDP, as opposed to 8% in the US, while. Their economy is largely similar to ours: about 1/4 manufacturing and 2/3 services; we have higher agriculture and extracting.

Despite this legal situation, Switzerland has a Gini index of 29.6 (ours is 41.1; lower means less income inequality). Switzerland has a homicide rate of 0.6 per 100,000 (ours is 4.7; 8 times as high). And Switzerland has much better health care outcomes by every metric (though it has high costs by European standards).

My point is that we can't just expect to adopt European laws and get European outcomes, because in large strokes we have a system pretty much like Switzerland's. The US faces fundamentally different problems than western European countries do.

It's common, when Americans talk about Switzerland, to simply wave one's hand and talk about "population differences", but to me this is incomplete. For one, Switzerland is a polyglot federation of states ("cantons", as they call them) with significant constitutional autonomy and a high percentage of immigrants in the population -- sound familiar? They're significantly more polyglot even than the US, with four official languages (the US has zero). And immigrants make up almost twice as much of the population as in the US (24% there vs. 13% here).

So what are the differences?

1. Even with the immigrants, Switzerland is almost entirely white (like 98% or so). White people, over and over again, have been shown to be much more willing to support government benefits for other white people than for nonwhite people. And the non-white populations in Switzerland do fall through the cracks much more often than white Swiss do. And you may remember Switzerland recently passed a very vindictive law essentially banning the construction mosques that look like mosques.

2. Switzerland has an 8% national sales tax, an 18% corporate tax, and a highest personal tax rate of 11.5% (our rates are 0%, 40%, and 55% respectively). The Swiss tax system is much more regressive than ours; this is a pattern that repeats itself throughout Europe.

3. They trade a lot more than we do. 63% of their GDP vs 24% of ours. But, they let their currency fall compared to the Euro and dollar based on their current account balance. This makes imports to Switzerland more expensive, and exports cheaper, so they wind up with a trade surplus many years. We, in contrast, both have a tendency to seek a strong dollar, and have trading partners who actively keep the dollar stronger than it probably should be for that exact reason.

4. 25% of workers in Switzerland belong to unions, as opposed to 10% in the US. Furthermore, the cantons require collective bargaining industry-wide in most cases.

5. Possibly most important, IMO: in the US, the only recognized stakeholders in a business are holders of equity (who have 100% say when things are good) and holders of debt (who have 100% say when things are bad). In contrast, Switzerland gives holders of both debt and equity a say at all times, and requires labor to have representation on the board as well.