Ethnography of Liberalism : I

There used to be an academic discipline called “Ethnography.” It was an inherently humble endeavor, the description of others, of usually exotic, far away, little-known groups. I mean head-hunters of Borneo, and Pygmies from central Africa. Ethnography had little pretension to “explain” as does modern Anthropology for example. I am engaged in a continuous study of the Left. I am doing daily, indefatigable ethnography of that quaint but interesting tribe.

In spite of my public identity as a conservative (listen to my radio show: Facts Matter on KSCO Santa Cruz 1080AM, every Sunday from 1am to 1pm, also available on-line), I am proud to say I have good entries into the liberal world of my small ultra-liberal and “progressive” town. I don’t know the liberal establishment and I think it does not know me, or it ignores me. I am in daily touch with the rank-and-file though. (I will not blow my cover by telling you how. You will have to take my word for it.) Because of my previous life in academia, I also know liberals. and even progressives, outside of my immediate area. I am talking of people with whom I have personal contacts at will, not National Public Radio.

Old-fashioned ethnographers used to exploit “native informants.” Those were local indigenous people who were willing to talk, trustworthy and who, the ethnographer had reasons to believe, were well informed. Lately, I have been having short and long-distance conversations with a younger man, a very moderate liberal, a liberal-leaning centrist, you might say. I have known the man for along time. He is intelligent, very hard-working and resourceful. He has even demonstrated an entrepreneurial bent. More importantly, I know him well enough to be sure that he prizes his personal credibility. My liberal friend is a valid native informant. I am not building a straw-man to burn later in triumph.

I asked him to give me the real reasons why he voted for Obama. He gave me many. We had several longish email exchanges. At first, he had trouble understanding “reasons,” confusing them with “motivations.” Then his reasons did not stand up to superficial examination. It turns out, he voted as he did because he wanted to believe in “change we can believe in.” He also spoke a great deal of President Bush’s “idiocy.” Upon closer examination, there was no “idiotic” act or pronouncements he could think of. There were only several statements of moral distaste for war and hesitant confessions of run-of-the-mill snobbery (See my essay on this blog: “Are Liberals Just Snobs?” posted 02/1610.) My friend did not say so himself but I got the feeling that he allowed the late-night shows, with their squeaky, creaky humor, to summarize his political positions. (I am not sneering; remember that I described him as hard-working person. He has a lot on his plate) Hence the non-sequitur regarding Pres. Bush’s alleged “idiocy.”

My native informant – who may have voted for Bush earlier – seemed to have voted as much against the non-running Bush as for Obama. He is quite capable intellectually to parse the difference between Bush Republicanism and the McCain brand. I am certain he did not do it. When the chips were doing, he chose to not think things through.

Then, the conversation drifts to health care, of course. He tells me point-blank that he is for the public option. That’s because his younger brother cannot afford health insurance. My native informant is a self-made man, I know this for a fact. I am obviously a self-made man, I know for a fact that he knows it. He should know that his reasoning has no moral currency. I tell him I think he should buy insurance for his brother. I ask him what reason he could possibly have to ask me to pay for his brother’s insurance. The conversation stops. I think I know why but I am just guessing: He does not want to take the giant step that consists in recognizing that the government has no money except what it takes from us, from me, among others, and from the coffee-shop waitress who earns nine dollars an hour.

In the end, I think it all boils down to feeling good irrespective of consequences. My friend is not short of intelligence; he is educated well above average; he is well informed about the way business works. He just insists on listening to his inner child more than to his reason.

I know what it’s like although I am conservative and a libertarian. I have an inner child too. It’s just that, every so often, I take the little wimp out and beat his ass.

Watch for more Ethnography of Liberalism on this blog soon.

Leçon d’Anglais #2

Traduire:

“Useful as teats on a bull.”

Ps: Il n’y a pas de “traduction litterale”. Il y a de mauvaises traductions et des bonnes. Les bonnes rendent le sens du texte original tellement bien que le lecteur, ou l’auditeur, ne se rend meme pas compte qu’il s’agit d’une traduction.   (Tu sais qui tu es; ne fait pas l’innocente ou l’innocent!)

Going Out on Four Limbs on the Health Debate

Following the open-house health care debate (2/26/10)  “moderated” by the person with the greatest vested interest, I am going to make four hazardous predictions:

1 The President’s popularity is going to surge for a while because Americans like fairness and the debate was a demonstration of fairness as compared to the back-room dealings that preceded it.

2 For the next week or so, the media, including the liberal media, are going to analyze what really happened. It’s going to become increasingly clear that the President did not know what he was talking about, did not understand the 4500 pages of the two bills, did not understand the cost of his proposal, did not understand the mood of the public.

3 The Democrat leadership is going to make a half-hearted attempt at passing the President’s bill with a simple majority through reconciliation, also known as the “nuclear option.” It will fail in almost all respects. Nevertheless, the Democrat leadership will declare victory.

4  Around June, July, we are going to see the launching of a  new health care reform initiative. It will have bi-partisan sponsorship, the real thing, led by Senator McCain. The new bill will comprise less than one hundred pages total. It will include the obvious: option to buy insurance across state lines, tort reform, limited portability of health care benefits, possibly an end to the exemption of health insurance companies from anti-trust laws . (Read the last again; you won’t believe it.) Moderate Democrats will get something to, I don’t know what, but not a public option. Democrats will get something suitable to take to the November election

Then, we will all go to the beach,

If any of these predictions fail, or all, you will have to forgive me. Although I had the time, I wasn’t able to force myself to listen to the whole seven hours. I am just tired of the whole thing. We need health care reform. The Democrat approach is almost entirely wrong-headed. Our institutions are working. The rest follows.

Pure Racism and Chinese Dining

There are several kinds of racism. The roots and the dynamics of racism are among the most interesting sociological issues. Here is a small but important fragment of the whole matter. The most common kind of racism involves three separate mental operations: 1 Assign an individual to a group; 2 Assign certain undesirable features of character or culture to the same group; 3 Assign these same undesirable characteristics to the individual because he belongs to the group.

The most pure from of common racism I know used to make me laugh. Of late, it has begun to annoy me. Here is a relevant story.

I pick up my wife at the airport after a short trip. We go out to celebrate our reunion. My wife wants to eat Chinese food. There is a Chinese restaurant near the airport where I have had excellent dinners in the past. It’s a large and old establishment with many Chinese customers. In fact, every time I have been there, I was with Chinese friends.

We sit down a little early. I don’t like the early bird menu, of course; I don’t like the regular menu either; the “specials” menu is not much more attractive. None of these menus corresponds well with my golden memory of the several original meals I have had there. I ask the waitress if there is a Chinese menu with different dishes than are on the English-language menu. “No,” she says. My wife and I order the less boring dishes from the main menu.

Within minutes a dish of crab with snow-peas appears on a nearby table. There are four Chines-looking people sitting around the table. I check; crab and snow-peas is not on any of my menus. I call the waitress. She acts as if she did not know what I am talking about. In truth, I don’t know if she does understand me. I have been there before. I come prepared. I pull out of my wallet a little note in Chinese characters a Chinese friend has prepared for me. The friend is a well educated man who bears me no ill-will. The note reads:

“ This foreign (barbarian or ghost) actually likes our traditional Chinese dishes, including organ meat. Please, serve him anything he asks for. He will pay without discussion for everything he orders.”

The waitress reads the note distractingly, smiles brightly and moves on. She is busy; waitresses are always busy. Besides, I have no way to know how well she reads Chinese characters. She does not come from the Shanghai urban upper-class elite schools, in all likelihood. However, one of the two advantages of age is that your intuition improves with experience. (I don’t quite remember what the other advantage is.) I know I am being ignored and taken for a ride but there is not much I can do. I eat my mediocre westernized dish because I am hungry but it’s not as a good as what either my wife or I could cook at home. Meantime, the Chinese table nearby is having a good time.

I have lived forty years in California, where there are Chinese restaurants at every street corner. Early on, a long time ago, when I was a in community college, a San Francisco Chinese waiter staved off malnutrition by slipping me double helpings of fried rice (also known as “rice fried with whatever leftovers”). Four of those forty years I spent in San Francisco, with its large Chinese-originated population. Yet, I can count on the fingers of two hands the number of times I have enjoyed really good Chinese food in America. That was enough however to convince me that there is such a thing outside the private Chinese homes where I have also enjoyed myself. Every single time I ate good Chines food in an American restaurant but one, I was accompanied by a Chines or by a Chinese-American person. Neatly every other time I had a mediocre to a horrible experience. The last time my wife and I tried to have lunch in Chinatown Number 2 (Clement Street) in San Francisco, by ourselves, the waitress first told us there was no lamb on the menu. When we pointed to five different lamb items in the bi-lingual menu, she said OK with resignation. Then, she brought up a dish of Mongolian-style something or other drenched in some sweet sauce but nevertheless without flavor. It took us but a few minutes to recognize that the lamb was actually chicken, not even an inventive substitution.

It would be wrong to imagine that the company of a Chinese person always saved me from bad food. Two episodes stand out. Once, after class, I am chatting with one of my MBA students from Taiwan. She is a slight, pretty woman with a great deal of aplomb. She occupies an important position in her company and she is obviously well educated. It’s noontime. Knowing what I know, I invite her for lunch at a nearby greasy chopsticks. I like that place because it serves the kinds of disgusting foods that both the Chinese and the French relish (I used to be French; read excerpts of my memoirs linked to this blog.) I am referring to parts of animals’ bodies you don’t even know exist.

I want beef tendon with noodles. People who eat tendon like it for its gelatinous texture. It’s quite distinctive. There is no other meat or part like it. It’s permanently on the menu there but I have already failed twice in ordering it. I figure my well-turned out, upper-class, authoritative Chines companion will pull rank on the scruffy waiter and obtain for me what I want. What I want is a seven-dollar dish of beef tendon, in black on white on the menu. My companion confirms that the dish is also advertised in big Chinese characters on the wall. She conducts a brief conversation with the waiter to order. Negativism is written all over his face and he turns around abruptly toward the kitchen. He comes back carrying two big bowls of noodles with braised beef. No a shred of tendon in sight.

This time, I am pissed off, in part because the scruffy waiter with the grease-spotted, formerly white serving-jacket has caused my female companion to lose face. Although his English appear limited I half-yell at him, “What the hell is wrong? My friend ordered tendon – pointing at the right sign on the wall, and then at my bowl – This is not tendon, NOT!” I am a big man coming from a long lineage of colonial oppressors. At least, I read a bit of anxiety in the waiter’ s eyes. He is not sure I am not going to strike him next. He mutters something in Mandarin. “What did he say?” I ask my companion. Her face has become greenish with anger. “He says that I mispronounced the word for ‘tendon.’” “Any chance?” I ask. “No way, she says, the words for ‘tendon’ and for ‘brisket’ are not even close.” We stomp out and go for a burger. I am re-pissed.

Another Chinese MBA student is also picking my brain after school. This one is a guy, the Chief Financial Officer of his successful Silicone Valley company. I advise him that the first twenty minutes are student advising and after that, it becomes professional consulting and he has to pay my rate. My rate is high because I don’t really want to do consulting. I add that he can avoid paying any bill at all if he will promise me an unforgettable Chines dinner of his choice. He likes the proposal. We agree to meet far away from campus and even farther from my town. On the appointed day, in a pricey-looking restaurant, he has a little conference in Chinese with the waitress. She keeps turning her head toward me and she motions “No.” The young man calls the manager. He starts the discussion anew with the manager. Same routine. Finally, the manager leaves with his order. “Did it work out, I ask?” “Only partly, I had to compromise. He did not want to serve us all that I wanted because of you.” Couldn’t be more clear. We eat pretty well, but I am sure I missed out on something.

Back to the airport night. I pay my bill with a sense of waste. Then, I spot a Chinese man in his forties who is walking around with an eye to the service. He asks me how my dinner, was, perfunctorily, California -surfer-by-day style. I tell him it was OK but not very good He seems dismayed. We start chatting. I let it slip that I like “authentic”food, that I cook a bit myself, that I collect mussels, and that right now, I have five pounds of fresh chanterelle mushrooms waiting for me at home. Suddenly, his face opens up as if he had been wearing a mask the minute before and the space between us fills with warmth. Yes, they have a Chinese menu; no they don’t usually propose it to “Caucasians” unless they are known personally. It’s up to the discretion of the waitress. “Next time, you talk to me and I will tell you what available.” I am not from the Caucasus, fucker! I haven’t even been there!

For the hundredth time, that night, a half-literate, provincial immigrant, perhaps right off the boat, has taken one look at me and used the only thing she knows about me, my appearance, my race in other words, to classify me. She has determined that I belong to a group that could not possibly appreciate the subtlety, the elegance, the sophistication of real, of good Chinese food. She has decided on the spot that the usual “Caucasian” slop was good enough for the likes of me and my wife. Incidentally, my wife is from India and looks it.

That’s racism in its pure form.

Leçon d’Anglais Courant

Je parcours la presse francophone tous les jours. Ce-faisant, inévitablement, je suis bien obligé de remarquer des tonnes de mauvais Franglais. Or, il n’y a pas de miracle: Le mauvais Anglais donne du mauvais Franglais. J’ai donc décidé de faire ce que je peux, à ma modeste échelle. pour améliorer la situation. De temps en temps, je vous donnerai une leçon d’Anglais sur ce blog. Voici la première:

“President Obama is up the creek.”

Il s’agit là d’un raccourci de l’expression complète:

“President Obama is up the shit creek without a paddle.”

creek= petite rivière ou gros ruisseau.

paddle= pagaie.

shit= _____________

Donc: “Le President Obama remonte la rivière de_____ sans pagaie.”

Qu’est-ce qu’on fait quand on n’a pas de pagaie?

C’est la leçon d’Anglais pour aujourd’hui. A suivre.

President Makes GOP Tow the Line On Health; Right-Wing Extends Patriot Act

Everybody is talking about the phony health summit tomorrow when the mad trio is again trying to cram down the throats of Republicans the health care reform plan Americans have said over and over they don’t want. If I were not a moderate individual and slow to dramatize, I would say that this, plus CO2 reduction by authoritarian Presidential order, looks like an old -fashioned coup. Ain’t gonna  happen. Don’ worry, and I am not talking about militias composed half of puffy old men. (Those are liberal wet-dreams.) Think about it: How many ways are there to stop quickly an illegitimate take-over of government in this great country?  “CO2 reduction by Presidential order” refers to the EPA’s announced attempt to regulate CO2 emissions. When the President says to jump, the EPA jumps;  that’s the way it’s supposed to be.

In the meantime, hardly anyone is paying attention to what the Senate did, or did not do, today (2/24/10). The Patriot Act, that abominable violation of the Constitution, that massive attack on civil liberties by the unspeakable, right-wing Bush administration, that horror, has been prolonged by the Senate.  Without any change at all. Remember that the party of Obama still has a 50/41 majority in the Senate.

Damn right-wing Republicans!

Toyota update.

I am watching on television  the lynching of the Toyota CEO in Congress.  The lynchers are led by congressmen who took money from the United Auto Workers. What a disgusting and cynical spectacle! There is nothing I can do about it as a citizen. I can do something as a consumer, however:

I pledge that I will never, under any circumstance, purchase  any auto product from UAW-plagued,  government-owned GM or Chrysler. I hope others will take the same pledge.

Rational, morally upright people don’t need stupid militias of old men to resist the slow-running  coup d’ etat by left-wingers.  We only need to flex our economic muscle. Just say “No!”

Toyota, the Evil One

I am just trying to understand: Toyota is a company that accumulated a stellar though unexciting record of quality all over the world over more than twenty years. Suddenly, in the past couple of years, Toyota started making more dangerous cars and cars more dangerous than GM, Chrysler, and Ford put together. The most dramatic testimony against Toyota before the Senate today was by a woman who says she experienced a mishap four years ago. I always say there are no conspiracies. I need to amend the statement: There are not lasting conspiracies because someone will  spill the beans sooner or later.

PS  Toyota recently closed the only one of its plants that was unionized( by the United Auto Workers).

Immigrants

I read this story on my radio program “Facts Matter” (ksco Santa Cruz 1080AM, every Sunday from 11am to 1pm). A listener who just caught the tail-end asked me to post it on this blog. Here it is, Mike.

They are a pretty young couple. He is a thin, blond Dutchman in his early thirties. Yasmina, his younger wife, is a honey-skinned beauty, and all curves. The day I met them, she was wearing a short, tight silky dress over a black push-up bra that was doing its job quite well, indeed. She is Pakistani by way of Toronto. They have come to seek their fortune in California.

Peter, the Dutchman, is working for a local software company. He is a language specialist in a generic sense, if there is such a thing. He began an advanced degree in Sanskrit, at Oxford. He did not finish because he could not “raise” the 35,000 pounds ($50,000) required. He spent a couple of years in India studying Sanskrit with a guru. When I asked him why he had not sought admission to an American doctoral program that would have supported him, one way or another, as is the custom, he gave me an answer I did not quite understand. It was something about changing priorities and about the infernal American demand for scholarly publications. Peter and Yasmina met at Oxford, where she completed an undergraduate degree. Or maybe not.

A Muslim by birth, Yasmina drinks wine with gusto, a sure sign of aristocratic upbringing. She speaks English perfectly and very fast. Peter discusses wines with much competence. His parents own a winery and vineyard in the heart of Burgundy, where land prices rival the cost of San Francisco real estate. Yasmina does volunteer work for a peace group while she awaits her work visa. (I did not try to elucidate the visa issue.) They both like the money Peter is making but they deplore Silicone Valley’s lack of talent for leisure. Peter is longing for European six-week vacations and extended weekends. When he has made his little hole here, he is determined to establish a European lifestyle. Yasmina can’t hide her annoyance, nor does she try, at the lack of a national health system, like they have, up north, in Canada. She did not actually say so, but I am guessing she thinks it outrageous that there is no dole to support an educated married young woman while she awaits a visa. She should at least get some pocket money, she thinks. (Being a feminist, she resents having to depend on her husband, of course.)

Peter and Yasmina are both dripping with contempt for President Bush. When she talks about the President, Yasmina loses her good manners. She hates him as if she knew him. And his policies, and his vitality, and his folksy manner, and his simplicity. She and her husband have made their choice: They would rather hear a devious speech with impeccable grammar than straight talk with occasional lapses of syntax. If someone created a council of sophisticated cosmopolitans to depose the President, their names would be among the first on the list. You know that, beneath the surface, they are on a mission. Since fate and economic necessity, and the economic sluggishness of Canada and Europe, have deposited them on our shores, they might as well have a go at civilizing America. They will teach us to become more refined, more complex, more attuned to nuances.

Yasmina, born in the terrorist cesspool of Pakistan and reared in a country that pretends to defend an area the size of the US with armed forces of 55,000, would gladly advise the next administration on national defense. (The current administration is hopeless, of course.) Peter would help her, naturally. It’s tempting to dismiss Holland as a charming old whore, except that weakness corrupts. Who can forget the (unionized) Dutch soldiers under UN command who turned over thousands of Bosnian Muslim men and boys to be slaughtered by Serbian butchers in Srebrenica? Peter has an additional project in America; he would simply like to show Americans how to really live. He is from Amsterdam, where 17^th century architectural jewels lining up the canals are occupied by prostitutes’ shops because there is no other economic use better able to pay the rent.

As Yasmina and Peter explain to me their plan to improve America, they are interrupted by a loud noise outside. Jesús is using his leaf blower to clean the neighbor’s yard, although today is a holiday. Yard maintenance is his second or third job. During the week, Jesús works at a hardware and construction supplies business. He raised himself to the skilled position of door framer and installer. This is not a slim achievement because the work requires precision and a visual sense of dimensions. Jesús left school in Mexico after the third grade. American non-metric measurements still give him trouble. (As they do me.) How he learned them at all is a mystery because he sure as hell does not read English. He can barely read Spanish.

Jesús’ wife works the night shift in a cannery. They raised their two children by taking turns so there would always be a parent at home. They recently adopted a third child, a little girl who is a distant relative. Jesús has many private customers who have told him they would gladly invest in any business he started. He does not say no, but he wants to keep his medical benefits as long as he has a child at home. He is doing fine, anyway. He and his wife own two houses. They used to have three but the county forced them to take down one, that they rented, because it violated some code or other. He is a good friend of mine so, I offered him a loan to tie him over. He thanked me affectionately but declined. “We are prepared,” he said.

Jesús and his wife have plenty enough money to move back to Mexico and live there forever without lifting a finger. They are not even thinking about it. He loves this country. He wants his children to be 100% American; he wants American grandchildren. The family speaks Spanish at home and attends a Catholic church in Spanish. They eat Mexican food every day. (But so do my children and every other Anglo kid in California.) They listen to corridos and rancheras on the radio. Yet, they are American to the core. This country made them, or they made themselves in this country. California is the best place to be Mexican, Jesús says, besides, here, you don’t have to choose one or the other.

Every one of Jesús’ customers gives Jesús a gift without knowing it. Everywhere he goes, he asks questions, in Spanish if possible, in English otherwise. In this fashion, he is quickly getting himself a first-rate political education. He never misses a chance to do someone a good turn. In a couple of years, when his first two children are out of the house for good, Jesús will work less and he will have time to run for local office. He laughs a lot; he has exquisite manners; he is a very good-looking man with smiling black eyes. Many women will vote for him just because of this. All the men who know him, and many who have only heard of him, will also vote for him because he is a good and strong man, and a perfect American.

Peter and Yasmina will most likely not have a chance to vote for Jesús. They will probably have floated back to Canada, or to Europe, where the gentle-born don’t have to work so hard. If, by some miracle, they are still here and have American citizenship, they will still not vote for Jesús: With his experience of the real world, the son of a bitch will probably come out a Republican!

© Jacques Delacroix 2003-10

Chocolate for Thought

 

There is a pervasive feeling among thinking people that this country is not just facing a severe economic crisis but that we are losing something exceptional. That something is American exceptionalism precisely. Lech Walesa, the blue-collar hero of Polish freedom from communism put it well in a recent piece in the Wall Street Journal. There is only one of America and if it ceases being itself, the world is left in the dark, goes the thinking. It’s not reasonable to count on the debt-ridden government pension-sucking Europeans to hold up the flashlight. The fact is that several European countries are disappearing because they don’t make enough babies to replenish themselves. That’s the ultimate form of pessimism. (And no, this is not a racist statement, I am completely pleased with the fact that brown-skinned Mexicans and their children are keeping the American population growing. They make good immigrants. See my article on Mexican immigration, with Nikiforov, in the Summer 2009 issue of the Independent Review.)

Unfortunately, there is an innate humility among Americans which makes it difficult for them to think aloud about American exceptionalism. If there were not, twenty years of cultural relativism in the schools would make the very thought difficult to formulate: “Everybody is equal. We are not any better than those who suck their grandmothers’ brain – but only after they die, or than those who practice horrendous sexual mutilation on little girls, or than those who still practice slavery. Only American slavery was atrocious. Slavery in exotic locales is kind of nice, actually, if you look at it in its proper cultural context.”

One way to overcome this shyness and diffuse sense of equality in order better to grasp what we are losing is to consider Swiss exceptionalism about which no one gives a damn, not even the Swiss. It turns out that in the main respects, there is not one America, there are several. Switzerland is one.

Contrary to a widespread impression, Americans probably don’t have the highest standard of living in the world. I will use Gross Domestic Product per capita (GDP/cap) to discuss this matter further. It’s simply the total value of the goods of all kinds produced in one country in one year divided by the number of population. If you care to look, you will find out why GDP/cap is not a good measure of anything because, blah, blah, blah. Or, you can simply trust, for the time being, my assertion that it’s a fine measure for our limited purpose of illustrating the standard of living in similar countries with fairly large economies. (Check my credentials to discuss such matters if you wish. Go through my vita, linked to this blog, and then, through Google. Go ahead, every time someone Googles me, I get a shiver up my leg, like Chris Matthew of MSNBC when he thinks of Barack Obama.)

The GDP per capita I am using is computed “PPP,” Purchasing Power Parity; it take into account different costs in different countries. So, it can be used to compare what ordinary people can really buy, at home, with their share of GDP. It compares what’s comparable. In this essay, I am only referring specifically to advanced developed countries. A short walk in any street of any town of any country I mention by name would persuade you that I am comparing what’s comparable. Those countries are not identical but they are similar. Americans have larger cars than the French but the French enjoy longer vacations, as do the Germans. The Swiss have smaller cars than Americans and shorter vacations than the French or the Germans but, in their country, just about everything works, which is more than we, or the French, can say.

For 2009 Luxembourg’s GDP/cap was above $77,000 and Norway’s above $59,000 while the US ranked 10^th at $46,600. Switzerland ranked 18^th at $41,600 By way of comparison the mean for the whole European Union was $32,700 . France stood at about that level. (All of the above figures are from the CIA World Factbook, available on-line, consulted 2/16/10.) For 2009, in raw terms, the French were thus collectively about 20% poorer than the Swiss. If you had made the comparison ten years ago, the French would have fared worse in comparison with the Swiss and the Swiss much better in comparison with Americans.

Luxembourg is really rich in every sense of the term plus it’s a fiscal paradise which makes comparisons difficult. Norway possesses important petroleum resources that are well administered and whose proceeds are well distributed. The other seven countries that rank above the US are oil sheikdoms or very small, which also makes comparisons difficult. The US has over 303 million people, France has 56 million, and Switzerland only about 7,5 million people. The point I want to make is that the Swiss are richer than about 95% of all people in the world or more and, more importantly, that they are richer on average than the French, right next door.

Switzerland is also smaller than France on every dimension. It has a small internal, domestic market. It’s not part of the huge European Union market, unlike France. (It does have a limited free trade agreement with the EU) Its climate is similar to that of France. Unlike France, Switzerland has almost no natural resources aside from expensive hydroelectric power. The Swiss are not even obviously better educated than the French. They spend the same % of their GDP on education as the French. That’s more in absolute terms since the Swiss GDP is higher. But France has obviously more top-notch schools at the university level than its neighbor. Contrary to a widespread impression, Switzerland is not primarily a financial country either. Its service sector, which would include finance, is proportionately smaller than that of France. It’s also smaller than the German and the American service sectors. If anything, Switzerland is a more industrial country – in the conventional sense – than France, and Germany, and the US. The usual common-sense explanations for the Swiss superiority in general don’t match well the Swiss reality.

For reasons I can’t go into here, many people like “cultural” explanations of socio-economic phenomena. Most of the people with such preferences don’t really know what they mean by culture. Yet, by any definition, language should be included under “culture.” With three and a half official languages, it’s difficult to argue that Switzerland has a distinctive culture. (It’s not impossible but it’s far-fetched.- Do you know what the fourth language, the one I call “half” is called?)

So, what does Switzerland have that France, and its neighbors, and most poor countries don’t have?

The answer is not about what it has but about what it does not have. Switzerland has little government. It applies with great rigor the principle of subsidiarity – which is also implicit i the US Constitution. Whatever concerns the village or town is decided at that level. What cannot be is decided at the canton level. Very few decisions ever reach the central, federal government. The Swiss central government is so small, you hardly every hear about it. The country’s President, unlike the French President (or the German Chancellor) is hardly ever on television because she has little to say that would matter to her citizens.

Correspondingly the weight of taxation is less in Switzerland than it is in France, not a little less but much less: It’s at 30% of GDP (like in pre-Obama America) against 46% in France. Now, let’s run this into real numbers, Suppose there were a political earthquake and the French taxation rate were reduced to Swiss levels. This means that in the first year, each French man, woman and baby, on average, would have about $5,000 to invest, to pay toward a car, or to buy more health insurance. What do you think this would do for the French economic growth rate?

To summarize: The Swiss federal government does not suck the substance out of its citizens and it’s too small to prevent them from doing whatever they want to do. The Swiss strive more than their neighbors who are in every way in similar circumstances and they thrive more. Does anyone think this is a coincidence?

Here the story ends. Until now, the US has been in most respects (including taxes) like tiny Switzerland. The Obama administration and its mad mentors in Congress want us to become like France.

As you ruminate these simple facts  also think of this: The giant food multinational firm, Nestlé, is a Swiss firm. Anyone who has no cocoa, no sugar and no milk to speak of, and who can sell chocolate to the world knows something worth knowing.