the happy conservative

Here’s a story in the American about Swiss economic success. Note particularly their system of competitive taxing. Genius.

The Swiss finance minister, Hans-Rudolf Merz, has publicly welcomed the flurry of tax competition. In a recent speech, he said that tax competition protects the citizen from the “excessive tax appetite” of governments and that it was one of the most important tools for budgetary discipline. Finally, he stressed that tax competition is a valuable “discovery procedure” leading to new and innovative taxation models. On a federal level, almost everything had been learned from watching the cantons experiment.

Christoph Blocher, Switzerland’s former justice minister and the president of the conservative Swiss People’s Party, is aware of the need to cultivate a business climate friendly to free enterprise. The owner of a major chemical company before entering politics, his keynote speech before the annual St. Gallen Business Conference in 2006 was a stirring defense of classical liberalism. “Anyone who still speaks in socialist rhetoric has slept through history,” he declared. “Economic liberalism has done more to fight poverty and create jobs than any other doctrine.”