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Legal scholar Eugen Huber had a big task on his hands when he sought to unite ethnic Italians, Germans, and French under a single federal system in the early 1900s. When he succeeded, modern Switzerland was born. In 1907, the Swiss Federal Assembly passed Huber’s Zivilgesetzbuch. Today the Swiss canton system is one of the most impressive national operating systems on earth.
It’s so impressive that economist Daniel Mitchell was led to enumerate ways “Switzerland is Better than the United States.” The following are four such ways, according to Mitchell:
1. The burden of government spending is lower in Switzerland. According to OECD, the public sector consumes only 33.1 percent of economic output in Switzerland, compared to 41.1 percent of GDP in the United States.
2. Switzerland has genuine federalism, with the national government responsible for only about one-third of government spending. The United States used to be like that, but now more than two-thirds of government spending comes from Washington.
3. Because of a belief that individuals have a right to control information about their personal affairs, Switzerland has a strong human rights policy that protects financial privacy. In the United States, the government can look at your bank account and does not even need a search warrant.
4. Switzerland has a positive form of multiculturalism with people living together peacefully notwithstanding different languages and different religions. In the United States, by contrast, the government causes strife and resentment with a system of racial spoils.
What makes the Swiss system so impressive concerning point 4 is that it doesn’t attempt to create a monolithic law or culture that demands minorities assimilate. In this way, the Swiss handle diversity far better than most countries. After all, diversity can be fracturing to a society. As Robert Putnam concluded in 2007, shocking the author as much as it did the social science world:
"It would be unfortunate if a politically correct progressivism were to deny the reality of the challenge to social solidarity posed by diversity," Putnam warns in the report. "It would be equally unfortunate if an ahistorical and ethnocentric conservatism were to deny that addressing that challenge is both feasible and desirable."
Switzerland isn’t perfect. But it has done a pretty good job of balancing diversity and unity.
More to the point, though, Switzerland has also achieved what the United States has not—a more decentralized nation-state. In other words, the canton is as powerful as the federal government in most regards, so the Swiss are ahead of the curve.
When Huber set about weaving together the Swiss, he had been concerned with updating the old Swiss Confederacy. Given Europe’s intellectual and political climate of the time, this update could have been an opportunity to centralize power. One only needs to look at the trends in those days to see that centralization was happening everywhere. Germany was consolidating power under Kaiser Wilhelm II, which helped sow the seeds of World War I. The Austro-Hungarian Empire lay close by. The British Empire was peaking under King Edward VII.
And yet the Swiss did what the Swiss do: their own thing.
A More Perfect Disunion
American history enthusiasts will recall that Swiss-style federalism had been the basic idea behind the failed Articles of Confederation. But the revolutionaries who won American Independence soon conspired to scrap the Articles after quelling a couple of rebellions. The U.S. Constitution was born. And though the Constitution is a brilliant document in most respects, creating checks and balances laterally among the branches of government, it could have done a better job of distributing power “to the states and to the people,” the 9th and 10th Amendments notwithstanding.
The American Experiment has been, if nothing else, a wild ride. Depending on whom you ask, the U.S. is either a beacon of hope or a Great Satan. At its inception, it was meant to be a loose confederation of states inhabited mostly by ornery farmers and a handful of fishermen. They shared a history of war by shedding the yoke of the British Monarchy, having a common tongue, and some cultural similarities. Beyond that, the States were not meant to be United.
After the Constitution was ratified, Vice President Thomas Jefferson expressed concerns about America becoming a behemoth. One way he thought the U.S. might stave off tyranny was through decentralization.
In an 1800 letter to Gideon Granger, Jefferson wrote,
"Our country is too large to have all its affairs directed by a single government. Public servants at such a distance, and from under the eye of their constituents, must, from the circumstance of distance, be unable to administer and overlook all the details necessary for the good government of the citizens; and the same circumstance, by rendering detection impossible to their constituents, will invite public agents to corruption, plunder and waste."
Jefferson was always skeptical of state power, even as he wielded it. That very year, after a close election against Aaron Burr, Jefferson became the third president of the United States. In his inaugural address, he reiterated his devotion to constitutional principles and concluded that they,
should be the creed of our political faith, the text of civic instruction, the touchstone by which to try the services of those we trust; and should we wander from them in moments of error or of alarm, let us hasten to retrace our steps and to regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty, and safety.
The trouble is that the U.S. became a Leviathan, having wandered in error and alarm. It’s unclear whether any civic instruction could help Americans retrace their steps. For better or worse, we’re on a new path.
If, after a thorough reading of history, you think that more centralization is largely a good thing, I probably won’t be able to disabuse you of that notion. Instead, I suggest plotting all the world’s countries on a graph with two axes: mostly centralized and mostly decentralized, then mostly liberal and mostly illiberal. Then ask yourself: Where would I want to live?
Small (and Decentralized) is Beautiful
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