After all that has been written on this blog about the government’s war to seize other people’s money without legal justification, it was nice to see James Higham’s piece about an interesting snippet of Swiss history.
It’s worth remembering that while western European governments – particularly our supposedly ‘business friendly’ morons in Westminster – strive to misappropriate more money in taxes from individuals and businesses, independent Switzerland is being put under huge pressure by the EU to raise taxes to EU levels and adopt EU law.
This is something we’ve covered before. The aim is to pressure countries outside the EU to make their tax systems as thoroughly harmful to business and individuals as those inside the EU, so no matter where a company or person goes they will have a government helping itself to copious amounts of their money. It is tax injustice, a blatant effort to financially imprison firms and people. It is also naked anti-competitiveness writ large; a transnational war by governments on the people they are supposed to serve.
200 years after Swiss troops fought defensive actions against the enemies of a meglomaniac who sought to unite Europe under his rule, the Swiss people are now on the other side of the fence, fighting a defensive action against a meglomaniac entity that is seeking to achieve the same end… worryingly with rather more success. Many people who believe in the nation state and people power will be hoping the Swiss win this time around.
Autonomous Mind 
fortunately the Swiss constitution gives the people the POWER to decide the direction their country travls in, not the select few privileged elites ‘elected’ to govern.
long may it be so and with Harrogate it will be so here also….
I wish the bloody EU would leave people alone didn’t we fight a war to stop this sort of thing happening/?
And, of course, they have the asset base of the hundreds of billions of avoided tax deposited in their country anyway.
And their gov looks like slinking into the EU via the back door. And their population is only 8 million anyway, so they can manage to have direct democracy. 60 million will be hard to manage, that’s if people can be bothered to vote. UK direct democracy with only 9 million bothering to vote (if that many) will be a contradiction, not democracy.
As for tax…didn’t France have a tax system that ignored the rich and taxed the rest…in 1780-ish……look what happened then..
independent Switzerland is being put under huge pressure by the EU to raise taxes to EU levels and adopt EU law.
And they have a wonderful historical tradition of resisting.
Andy Baxter,
The term you were looking for is probably”Elective Oligarchy”.