Posted on 04/28/2015 7:09:06 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Geneva, Switzerland — What is the happiest place? Last week in its annual “World Happiness Report,” the United Nations reported that Switzerland was No. 1. The United States ranked No. 15, and the African country of Togo came in last, at number 158.
Switzerland is arguably the world’s most successful country — and most improbably so. It is landlocked and without much in the way of natural resources. It has four official languages, many different religious groups, and is surrounded by warring neighbors. Yet, it has remained an island of peace and prosperity. The last armed conflict on Swiss territory occurred in a less-than-one-month-long civil war in 1847, where about 130 were killed.
The last time it was invaded was by Napoleon in 1798. The core of the Swiss Confederation goes back to 1291, when three Swiss cantons (i.e., states) united in a common defense. Over the centuries, Switzerland has grown to its present 26 cantons.
The modern Swiss federal state goes back to 1848, when a federal constitution was adopted, giving the central government responsibility for defense, trade and legal matters. All other government matters were left to the cantons and the communes (i.e., cities and towns). The U.S. Constitution, which is more than a half-century older than the Swiss, also greatly limited the powers of the central government — but unlike the Swiss, there has been a centralization of power in the capital at the expense of the states and local governments.
Switzerland now has a higher real per capita income than the United States, a lower unemployment rate (3.2 percent versus 5.5 percent), and approximately one-third the amount of government debt in relation to gross domestic product. According to the latest annual Economic Freedom of the World index, Switzerland ranks No. 4 in economic freedom
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
Switzerland has been ranked No. 1 in international competitiveness, in part, because their maximum corporate tax rate of 18 percent is below the world average (the U.S. has a non-competitive 35 percent federal corporate tax rate — plus state corporate taxes).
Being the practical folks they are, the Swiss have created an apprenticeship program, which two-thirds of young adults choose. As a result, they learn a profession as employees of a company with on-the-job training coupled with two days a week in the classroom. After four years, they have basic professional qualifications. This has resulted in a youth unemployment rate of only 3.2 percent (a fraction of that in the United States and most European countries).
Switzerland ranks 4th in world gun ownership at 45.7 per 100 residents, but little gun-related street crime.
See here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_guns_per_capita_by_country
There are Nine countries with no minimum wage, Switzerland is one of them (Singapore, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Austria, Italy, Switzerland.)
It also has no imported slave class on the dole for 100 years
and how about illegal 3rd world illiterate immigrants who refuse to assimilate? got a lot of them?
Switzerland’s immigration laws are one of the toughest in the world.
It is NOT EASY to get a Swiss citizenship.
I guess Oprah is outa luck, then!
What, no politicians eager to court barely literate, unskilled illegal aliens for cheap votes?
RE: I guess Oprah is outa luck, then!
Actually no. Tina Turner relinquished her US citizenship ( yep, taxes were a factor ) and eventually obtained Swiss citizenship.
She now lives in Zurich.
See here:
Great idea. Here, too many kids waste their time sitting in a classroom being disruptive, and when they graduate they can't even fill out an employment application.
England used to have a policy (perhaps they still do) that you could legally leave school at age 14-1/2 if you had an apprenticeship. We really need to look at some of these ideas for the United States. We have this notion here that everybody has to take up room in a classroom until at least age 17, and that everybody should strive to go to college. But that's not a fit for everybody.
well, they got their one token then!
Wished my school district would have done something like that. Richest in the state and everything was geared towards college prep which is great for those who were going.
I’d rather have learned something that would have gotten my foot in the door. The closest was either agriculture or auto mechanics. I took AM and it was the only class that was remotely useful in terms of life.
Yeah, they left out how well-armed the Swiss were, and still are.
Apprenticeship Program -> Children are relegated beginning in the 5th Grade (officially, normally a bit earlier) to one of three tiers - “College bound”, “business”, blue collar. Once relegated, it is VERY hard to move to a higher tier.
Only the “College Bound” attend high school. All others are forced to find an employer willing to fund three years of education, in a very specific field (e.g. Brick Layer, Butcher, etc...). There are never enough positions offered in any given year to accommodate all the children that need such a position. roughly 10% do not get any education after the ninth grade. Which in turn leads to them being unemployable. They never enter the work force / are registered as seeking employment and are thus not “unemployed”.
Youth Unemployment, defined as not working otherwise able to) is about 10% - for non-swiss ~16%.
Wages tend to be higher than in other countries, but the CoL is unbelievable -
The reason the Swiss are so much happier, everyone else is worse off! (and they know that the Banks are earning money on everyone else, which helps them in the long run).
and how about illegal 3rd world illiterate immigrants who refuse to assimilate? got a lot of them?
And this is the ugly truth that no one dares utter when comparing our country to other homogenous nations.
3% of our population commits 40% of the crime in this nation, and they are the demographic of our population which Switzerland doesn't have.
Nowadays it is absolutely verboten to point this out. We all want to show our "tolerance" by ignoring the truth.
Well, Albert Einstein was a Swiss Citizen.
And it was in Geneva where Reformed Theology was developed under John Calvin.
Leonhard Euler and Johann BERNOULLI gave us very interesting mathematics
Henry Dunant founded the Red Cross and look where it’s gotten us today....
From what I have researched so far, it appears that Swiss writer Vattel was the man who put the idea of Independence into the founder's heads.
Finally, several sovereign and independent states may unite themselves together by a perpetual confederacy, without ceasing to be, each individually, a perfect state. They will together constitute a federal republic: their joint deliberations will not impair the sovereignty of each member, though they may, in certain respects, put some restraint on the exercise of it, in virtue of voluntary engagements. A person does not cease to be free and independent, when he is obliged to fulfil engagements which he has voluntarily contracted.
It looks like Vattel created our Country. No other writer of natural law called for Independence and the formation of a Federal Republic. Our Revolution started a little over a decade after his book arrived on our shores.
Actually, the really ugly truth is that crime rates disaggregated by ethnicity in the U.S. tend to mirror crime rates in the country of origin of each group’s ancestors.
Of course, if the left really believed in neo-Darwinism as an account of human origins and human nature, rather than just using fealty to the scientific theory (or metaphysical research program — as Popper called it — and it is *not* a careful reformulation as a falsifiable theory to which the left purports fealty) as an anti-Christian shibboleth, the left would not fancy that differences in social outcomes among human populations that faced different selection pressures for tens or hundreds of thousands of years must solely be due to invidious discrimination.
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