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Paul Thibodeau retweeted
Audrey Hepburn's famous slenderness, copied by the fashion world for seventy years, was what was left of a girl who had lived through a winter on tulip bulbs.
In the autumn of 1944 she was fifteen, living with her mother in Arnhem and then at her grandfather's house in Velp, while the battle for the Rhine bridges was fought around them. She had been dancing in blacked-out houses to raise money for the Dutch resistance. That winter the German authorities cut off food to the occupied west of the Netherlands, the canals froze, and the cities fell to a few hundred calories a day.
The Dutch call it the Hunger Winter. People ate whatever they could find. Endive, when there was any. Nettles. Bread made from peas. And tulip bulbs, dug up and peeled, the bitter core cut out, ground into a grey flour that one survivor said tasted of sawdust. The government printed recipes for them.
Her son wrote later that she would spend whole days in bed with a book, trying to stop thinking about food.
When liberation came in May 1945 she had just turned sixteen. She was nearly five foot six and weighed 88 pounds, with jaundice, oedema and anaemia, and close to death. A Dutch soldier gave her seven chocolate bars and she ate the lot, with condensed milk from the relief trucks, and was violently sick, because her stomach had been empty too long.
The relief organisation was UNRRA, which became UNICEF. She spent the last years of her life working for it.
Her family believes the famine left her body unable to put weight on for good. The world saw the waist and the collarbones and built a standard of elegance on them.
The Dutch bulb growers later named a white tulip after her.
Paul Thibodeau retweeted
In 1790, a statesman who fought the British crown to defend the American colonists looked at a revolution praising "equality and progress"—and predicted a bloodbath Before a single drop of blood was spilled.
Long before he became the father of modern conservatism, Edmund Burke was a fierce champion of the American Revolution. As a Member of the British Parliament, he famously stood before the House of Commons and warned King George III that English colonists had liberty in their blood and could never be taxed into submission. Even fewer know that Burke was born in Dublin to a Catholic mother and a Protestant father, forcing him to witness firsthand how the state used tyrannical laws to strip his own Catholic relatives of their property and heritage.
That upbringing gave Burke a superpower: he could instantly tell the difference between fighting to preserve historic freedoms (like the Americans in 1776) and tearing down civilization to build a radical utopia (like the French in 1789). When the French Revolution erupted, European elites cheered as mobs attacked the Church, erased the traditional calendar, and promised a paradise of "pure reason." Burke stood practically alone, writing Reflections on the Revolution in France—a masterclass in political foresight that sold 30,000 copies in an era when most citizens couldn't even read.
Burke exposed a truth that defines today’s culture wars: when progressive ideologues tear down inherited traditions, family structures, and religious faith in the name of "social justice," they don't liberate humanity. They destroy the very guardrails keeping tyranny at bay, creating a moral vacuum that only a ruthless authoritarian state can fill. Three years before the Reign of Terror began, he predicted that France’s utopian experiment would end in mass executions and a military dictatorship—a prophecy fulfilled to the letter by the guillotine and Napoleon Bonaparte.
Writing over two centuries ago, Burke delivered the ultimate warning against those who seek to erase a nation's history and rebuild society from scratch:
"Society is indeed a contract... It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born... Rage and frenzy will pull down more in half an hour, than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years."
Burke understood that civilization isn't a playground for arrogant social engineers—it is a sacred inheritance we hold in trust, and the moment a nation forgets the wisdom of its ancestors, it surrenders its future to the mob.
Paul Thibodeau retweeted
Between 1820 and 1900, real GDP per capita in the United States grew eightfold. No welfare state. No central bank. No income tax. The federal government consumed less than 3% of GDP for most of that period, and the results speak for themselves.
Secure property rights, contract enforcement, and a commodity-backed dollar created the conditions where capital formation exploded. Entrepreneurs knew that what they built, they kept. John D. Rockefeller drove kerosene prices from 58 cents per gallon in 1865 to under 8 cents by 1885, delivering affordable light to millions of ordinary households, not through government mandate but through relentless productive competition.
Real wages for manufacturing workers doubled between 1860 and 1890. Immigration surged because workers across Europe calculated, correctly, that their labor earned more in Philadelphia or Pittsburgh than anywhere in the old world. Markets made that signal clear.
Critics point to inequality, child labor, and dangerous working conditions, ignoring that mass poverty preceded industrial capitalism. Andrew Carnegie's Pittsburgh was brutal, but it was also dramatically better than the subsistence farming the workers' grandparents had endured.
The railroad network grew from 9,000 miles in 1850 to over 160,000 miles by 1890, financed almost entirely by private capital once you exclude the genuinely corrupt land-grant subsidies, which free market thinkers condemned at the time. State intervention produced scandals; private lines produced the freight.
Minimal government produced the fastest sustained material improvement in recorded human history to that point.
Paul Thibodeau retweeted
In 1957, a Russian immigrant published a novel of more than a thousand pages built around one question: what happens if the people who make the world run simply stop?
Its title is Atlas Shrugged. In France it's called La Grève, The Strike. It wasn't even translated into French until 2011. That tells you something.
This morning, I think Elon Musk wrote the sequel.
A. Where the book comes from.
Ayn Rand was born Alisa Rosenbaum in Saint Petersburg in 1905. As a teenager, she watched Bolshevik soldiers walk into her father's pharmacy and seize it in the name of the people. Her family lost everything. Not to a competitor. To a committee.
She fled to America in 1926 and spent the rest of her life writing about one distinction: those who create, and those who seize.
B. The story.
In Atlas Shrugged, America is sliding into decline. Not because of war. Because of rules. Year after year, a growing class of bureaucrats, regulators and planners decides that production must be controlled, shared "fairly," frozen. They never build anything. They issue directives. The worst one freezes every worker in his job and forces every inventor to hand over his patents for the public good.
And one by one, the people who make the country run start disappearing. The best engineers. The industrialists. The inventors. An oil man sets his own wells on fire before vanishing. The whole country keeps repeating a question it doesn't understand: "Who is John Galt?"
John Galt is the man behind the disappearances. He has convinced the creators to go on strike. They withdraw to a hidden valley in the Colorado mountains, where everyone keeps what they make and trades freely. And they let the world find out what it looks like without them.
The lights go out in New York. The grey men are left alone with their directives, and discover that a directive has never produced a single kilowatt.
C. The core idea.
The strike isn't about money. It's about consent.
Rand's insight is that the system that captures the creators runs on their cooperation. It needs them to keep producing so it has something to redistribute. The bureaucrat is a parasite who needs a host. Remove the host, and he's exposed as what he always was: useless.
D. What Musk just did.
This morning, Musk announced that next year he will give one of his own SpaceX shares to every kid in America. "The first of many."
Here's what's fascinating. It's the strike, run in reverse.
Rand's creators withdrew. Musk stays. He keeps building rockets, satellites, AI. But instead of walking away from the system, he walks around it. The value goes straight from the builder to the citizen. No ministry, no agency, no committee in the middle.
Rand had to make the creators disappear to prove the bureaucrats were useless. Musk doesn't need to disappear. He just needs to stop routing value through them. Same result. The grey men are left standing in the middle of a pipe nobody uses anymore.
E. The difference that changes everything.
Rand's strike has a flaw her critics never stopped pointing out: ordinary people are left behind. The creators retreat to their valley. The rest of the country sits in the dark.
Musk's version fixes that. He isn't taking the creators out of the world. He's bringing the world into the valley. Every kid in America becomes a shareholder in the machine. Not a spectator of the strike. A participant.
That's the alliance being formed right now: builders and citizens, directly, with nothing in between. And the only people who lose that deal are the ones who never built anything.
F. Why now, and not in 1957.
In Rand's time, the strike was a fantasy. You couldn't produce at scale without the state's permission, and you couldn't reach every citizen without its pipes.
In 2026, one founder can build rockets, run a global network from orbit, and pledge equity to 73 million children in a single post. AI will soon do in seconds what a ministry does in years. The tools of the strike finally exist. And they don't require anyone to leave.
G. The ending.
For seventy years, "Who is John Galt?" was a shrug. A way of saying nothing can be done.
In the book, the strike ends when the creators decide the road is clear and walk back into the world to rebuild it.
That's the scene we're watching. Not a man leaving. A man coming back, with a gift for every child.
The grey men are about to discover what Rand promised them seventy years ago: a world that no longer needs them.
I don't know if you realize what just happened.
Elon Musk is completely bypassing the State.
For 100 years, we've been told the problem is capital. That it must be captured, taxed, redistributed. With an army of intermediaries standing between those who create wealth and the people: ministries, agencies, commissions, bureaucrats.
Musk is doing the opposite. He's taking his capital and giving it directly to the people. One SpaceX share to every kid in America. Not a handout. Not a subsidy. A piece of the machine that's taking humanity to Mars.
And he says it himself: this is the first of many.
Mises understood this back in 1944: the bureaucrat creates nothing. He administers what others created, following rules that have no connection to the value produced. The day value flows directly from the one who creates it to the one who receives it, the bureaucrat has no function left.
That's what's being born right now. A new liberal world order, where the very concept of the State will make less and less sense.
The world we're entering is a world of abundance. AI, robots, energy, space. And that abundance won't come through the State, for one simple reason: we have a century of proof that it doesn't work.
Redistribution was version 1.0. Direct distribution of capital is 2.0.
While France is still debating how to tax builders even more, America is handing stock to its kids.
Pick your side.
Paul Thibodeau retweeted
“Ask yourself a simple question. Why is almost every celebrity on the same side?
“Actors, singers, late-night hosts, award-show presenters. Thousands of people with different backgrounds, different lives, different temperaments. And somehow, on every major issue, they land on the exact same opinion, at the exact same moment, with the exact same hashtags. Free minds don't behave like that. An ecosystem does.
“Now ask a second question. Elon Musk is landing rockets on their own tails. He's bringing internet to villages that never had a phone line. He's building cars that drive themselves and implants that let paralyzed people move a cursor with their thoughts. Artists are supposed to be the ones who dream about the future. Here is a man actually building it. How many of them stand next to him? A handful. Why?
“Because Hollywood is not a free market of talent. It's a royal court.
“A young actor doesn't make it because he's good. Hundreds are good. He makes it because someone lets him in: an agent, a casting director, a producer, a studio, an awards committee. Every step is a gate, and every gate has a keeper. When your whole career depends on a few rooms, you learn very quickly what can be said in those rooms and what can't.
“This is how it works. First you stay silent. Then you nod. Then you repeat. Then you believe. Compromise never arrives all at once. It arrives one dinner, one role, one red carpet at a time. And once you've given up enough, you need the system to stay in place, because the system is the only thing that makes the sacrifice worth it.
“Want to see the whole mechanism in a single story? For decades, one of the most powerful producers in Hollywood was the subject of accusations from dozens of women, and much of the industry treated it as an open secret. A host even joked about it at an Oscar nominations announcement, and the room laughed. Speaking up seriously meant losing everything. When the truth finally broke, the same industry dressed in black and applauded its own courage. Silence while it pays. Virtue once it's safe. That's the system.
“And that's the real lie. Not that these people are monsters. Most aren't. The lie is calling it courage. Real courage costs you something. Saying what every room in town already applauds costs nothing. Saying the opposite is what costs. That's why so few artists stand with Elon. Not because they've studied his ideas and rejected them, but because standing there is a career risk they can't afford.
“Look at what happened to him when he left the consensus. Advertisers fled. Friends disappeared. Invitations stopped. He could afford it. Almost nobody else can. That tells you exactly how free that world really is.
“So wake up. Stop taking your political cues from people whose paycheck depends on agreeing. A celebrity endorsement is not an argument. It's a loyalty signal. Your vote, your convictions, your children's future: don't outsource them to people who are paid to recite lines someone else wrote.
“The people who build the future rarely get applause from the people who perform it.
“Think for yourself. It's the most American thing you can do.”
—Brivael Le Pogam (@brivael), translated from French
Paul Thibodeau retweeted
My dear American friends, in my last post I gave you a snapshot of where France stands today. Now let me show you how we got here. I want you to see the whole movie before you buy the ticket.
After the war, France was a machine. We called it the Trente Glorieuses, thirty glorious years. We built Concorde, the most beautiful aircraft ever made. We built a fleet of nuclear reactors in about fifteen years and gave ourselves some of the cleanest, cheapest electricity in the world. We built Ariane and put Europe in space. We built the TGV, the fastest train on earth. We invented the Minitel, an online network in millions of homes before most of you had heard of the internet. We were not a museum. We were builders.
Then came 1981. François Mitterrand. Think of him as our Bernie Sanders, except he actually won. At his side, in the office next to his at the Élysée, sat a 37-year-old prodigy named Jacques Attali, his special adviser for the next ten years. The brightest minds of the left, convinced they could run an economy from a ministry.
Here's what they did. They governed with Communist ministers. In 1982 they nationalized dozens of banks and the biggest industrial groups in the country: Paribas, Suez, Saint-Gobain, Thomson, Pechiney, Rhône-Poulenc. They lowered the retirement age to 60. They cut the work week to 39 hours and added a fifth week of paid vacation. They created a wealth tax. They hired massively into the public sector.
Reality hit in less than two years. Capital fled, inflation ran wild, and the franc was devalued three times. In March 1983 Mitterrand had to slam on the brakes and impose austerity just to stay in the European monetary system.
But here's the trick: the brakes never reversed anything. They just slowed the ratchet. The so-called right came back with Jacques Chirac, and nothing was undone. Under Chirac's presidency, France passed the 35-hour work week. Left or right, every government added one more program, one more rule, one more tax, and nobody ever took one away.
At the same time, the political class did something even more destructive than bad economics. It turned the youth into a political instrument. Instead of teaching young people, including millions of children of immigrants, to love the country they lived in, it taught them a story of guilt and grievance: France as the oppressor, France as the thing to resent. You cannot integrate people into a country you've taught them to despise. We are living with the consequences of that narrative today, in our schools, our suburbs, our streets.
Then forty years of slow decline, all the way to Macron. And the story has a perfect ending. In 2007, Jacques Attali chaired a commission on how to unleash French growth. Its deputy rapporteur was a young civil servant named Emmanuel Macron. The commission proposed more than 300 reforms to free the economy. Almost none were ever implemented. Even the men who built the system knew it wasn't working, and even they couldn't undo it.
No balanced budget since 1974. Public spending around 57% of GDP. Debt above 3,300 billion euros. Growth stuck under 1%.
Now the number that should keep you up at night. In 1995, GDP per person in France was about $27,000. In America, about $29,000. We were neck and neck. Today France is around $49,000. America is around $90,000. You are now nearly twice as rich per person as we are.
What changed? Not our talent. Not our engineers. Not our schools of mathematics. The only thing that changed is that we went all in on socialism. The 35 hours, the endless regulation, the taxes that chase out anyone who builds, the belief that the state should do everything and the individual should ask permission for everything.
There's a line people love to attribute to Einstein: insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. We tried. For forty years, we tried. Every government promised that one more program, one more tax, one more regulation would finally fix things. You just saw where it got us.
So if you choose the Democratic Party, which is literally turning socialist in front of your eyes, you will deserve what comes next.
Let me tell you exactly what will happen if you go down that road. Nobody will vote for decline. Every single measure will sound generous, compassionate, reasonable. Your builders will slowly leave or stop building. Your state will grow every year and never shrink. Your debt will compound. And in thirty years, your kids will look at a chart like the one I just described and wonder when it all went wrong.
You still have something we lost. You have Elon Musk sending rockets to orbit and landing them on their tail. You have Palmer Luckey building the defense industry of the future. You have Jeff Bezos, Jensen Huang, and thousands of founders nobody has heard of yet, building in garages right now.
Trust your entrepreneurs. Don't trust your politicians.
I come from your future. Don't make it yours.
I’m French. I want to talk to Americans who are about to vote Democrat. Not to insult you. To warn you.
I come from your future.
In France we did everything your progressive politicians promise. Free healthcare, free college, generous welfare, strong unions, heavy regulation, high taxes on the rich, a state that takes care of everything. Public spending close to 57% of GDP, one of the highest on the planet. On paper, it’s the dream.
Here’s what it looks like from the inside. France hasn’t passed a balanced budget since 1974. Our debt is above 3,300 billion euros. Interest on that debt is becoming one of the biggest items in the national budget. Our hospitals are collapsing despite record funding. Our schools rank lower every year. Young people with degrees can’t afford an apartment in the city they were born in. Our best engineers leave for London, Zurich and San Francisco. And the rich you wanted to tax? They left too, and took the jobs with them.
The promise was protection. The result is stagnation.
The worst part is that nobody in France voted for decline. Every single step sounded generous, compassionate, reasonable. One more program. One more regulation. One more tax to fund it. Each step alone makes sense. Fifty years of them, and you wake up in a country that can no longer build a nuclear plant on time or keep its streets safe.
I love America because it’s the one place on earth where people still believe they can build something from nothing. I came to Silicon Valley as a self-taught kid and it changed my life. That spirit is the most precious thing your country has.
Before you vote, ask yourself one question: is the program you’re voting for making America more like America, or more like France?
Trust me. You don’t want to be France.
Paul Thibodeau retweeted
The Barbary states declared that the
Quran gave them the right to seize Christian ships and enslave their crews.
And the Pasha of Tripoli demanded tribute and declared war on America in 1801
Jefferson refused to pay. He ordered the Marines and the fleet to Tripoli instead.
That's why the Marine Corps hymn still sings
"…to the shores of Tripoli." We didn't negotiate with jihad. We ended it with cannon fire and steel.
America's first war as a free nation was fought against Islamic piracy and slavery.
Paul Thibodeau retweeted
True Story:
In December 1960, a twenty-three-year-old clerk named Armando Valladares sat at his desk at the Postal Savings Bank in Havana, Cuba.
The new communist regime had issued a directive requiring every government worker to place a small sign on their desk reading: "I am with Fidel."
Armando quietly refused. He stated that he was a Christian, he valued individual freedom, and he would not pledge fealty to a Marxist dictatorship.
Within days, political police raided his home, labeled him a counter-revolutionary, and threw him into a courtroom where a military tribunal handed him a thirty-year prison sentence.
The regime told him that release was simple. All he had to do was sign a single confession admitting his error, renouncing his faith, and declaring support for the socialist revolution. Sign the paper, and he could walk out to his family.
Armando looked his captors in the eye and refused.
The consequences were merciless. Guards shoved him into the infamous cells of Isla de Pinos and La Cabaña. They stripped him of his clothing, denied him medical treatment, and locked him in pitch-black solitary confinement boxes called tapadas. When he launched hunger strikes to protest the torture of fellow inmates, guards cut off his food and water entirely. Malnutrition caused severe peripheral neuropathy, paralyzing his legs and binding him to a wheelchair.
They broke his body, yet they could never touch his mind.
Sitting in total darkness, Armando began writing poetry. Lacking pens and paper, he used toothpicks, cigarette wrappers, and his own blood to write verses detailing the brutal realities of political prisoners.
Outside the prison walls, his young wife, Marta, dedicated her life to his cause. Visiting under heavy scrutiny, she quietly smuggled those bloodstained scraps of paper past armed guards, carrying his words to foreign embassies, publishers, and human rights organizations across the free world.
For twenty-two years, Armando endured beatings, starvation, and solitary confinement. Every few months, officials brought the same confession document to his cell, promising immediate freedom if he yielded his pen. For twenty-two years, he gave them the exact same answer: to sign away his conscience was a price far greater than death.
In 1982, mounting international pressure finally forced the Cuban government to release him. Armando arrived in the United States, gaunt and scarred, carrying the memories of two decades inside a socialist dungeon.
He published his memoir, Against All Hope, detailing the atrocities the world had chosen to ignore.
The book landed on the desk of President Ronald Reagan.
Reagan read the account with tears in his eyes and recognized something rare: an unyielding witness to the cost of human liberty. In 1987, Reagan bypassed the usual circle of career bureaucrats and made a stunning appointment. He named Armando Valladares the United States Ambassador to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.
Months later, the man who had been starved in a Havana isolation cell rolled into the grand assembly halls of Geneva, Switzerland, carrying the diplomatic authority of the United States.
Taking his seat across from the very Cuban officials who had overseen his torture, Ambassador Valladares delivered devastating speeches exposing the secret labor camps, the political executions, and the brutality of the Castro regime. He successfully organized an international coalition that forced the United Nations to launch a formal inspection into Cuba’s human rights abuses, delivering a humiliating diplomatic defeat to the dictatorship.
Tyrants survive by convincing ordinary citizens that resistance is futile and compliance is safety. Armando Valladares proved that an entire totalitarian empire can be brought to its knees simply because one man refused to put a propaganda sign on his desk. Real sovereignty belongs to those who value their soul more than their comfort.
Paul Thibodeau retweeted
Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act in March 2010, guaranteeing you cheaper insurance, more competition, and the ability to keep your doctor. Premiums for individual plans more than doubled between 2013 and 2017. Deductibles climbed so high that millions of technically "insured" Americans still skipped medical care because the out-of-pocket costs were prohibitive.
The government mandated what your insurance must cover, forced healthy young people to subsidize older high-risk pools, and then expressed genuine surprise when prices spiked. Prices always tell the truth.
The 2009 stimulus, officially $831 billion, operated on the Keynesian assumption that government spending creates wealth. Government spending transfers wealth, first taxing or borrowing it from the productive sector, then routing it through political channels where efficiency is nobody's personal concern. The "shovel-ready jobs" Obama later joked about produced no measurable acceleration in recovery. The recession that followed 2008 should have cleared in 18 months, as previous sharp downturns historically did when left alone. The Obama recovery took a decade and delivered the weakest GDP growth of any post-war expansion on record.
Dodd-Frank, signed in 2010, weighs 2,300 pages. Community banks spent compliance budgets they never had, and roughly 1,900 small banks vanished between 2010 and 2016. The big institutions that actually caused the 2008 crisis absorbed the regulatory cost with ease and used the new complexity as a competitive moat. Regulations written by large players consistently protect large players. The middle-class small-business owners who needed credit found fewer lenders willing to offer it.
Obama also expanded drone warfare to seven countries, assassinated American citizens without trial, and extended the surveillance state through a reauthorized PATRIOT Act, which undermines any libertarian's case that the Democratic Party is less hostile to civil liberties than its competition.
Then there was Cash for Clunkers, which destroyed 690,000 working cars in 2009 by crushing them with sodium silicate. Mechanics lost parts inventory. Buyers on a budget lost affordable transportation. Prices for used cars spiked. You paid more so dealers could move new inventory.
A generation of voters watched the government spend $5 trillion across two terms, nationalize health insurance markets, regulate finance into oligopoly, and print money through three rounds of quantitative easing that inflated asset prices and rewarded those who already owned property. You paid higher premiums, earned lower real wages, and watched your savings earn nothing in a deliberately suppressed interest-rate environment. The bill always arrives later. You see the ribbon cutting and the document signing, but you feel the damage to your pocket only years later.
Paul Thibodeau retweeted
The freest economy in American history produced the greatest explosion of living standards the world had ever witnessed, and the people who benefited most were the poor.
Between 1870 and 1900, real GDP per capita roughly doubled. Steel output went from 77,000 tons in 1870 to over 11 million tons by 1900. Kerosene dropped so cheap that even working-class families could light their homes at night. Carnegie drove down steel prices while paying wages that rose faster than inflation. The market did that. No regulator in Washington achieved this.
Federal spending in 1870 sat at roughly 3.7% of GDP. Congress had no income tax until 1913. The regulatory state was microscopic. Capital formation exploded precisely because entrepreneurs kept what they built.
But there is a villian here: the progressive revision of this history. Academics frame the Gilded Age as a catastrophe of exploitation, demanding the state as savior. The numbers destroy that story. Real wages for unskilled labor rose 50% between 1860 and 1890. Infant mortality fell. Life expectancy climbed.
What about technology? Could some important things have been invented during that time? Only AC power, the lightbulb, the telephone, the camera, the automobile, the airplane... nothing really important.
Property rights worked. Contract enforcement worked. Sound money, anchored to gold, kept capital allocation honest and prevented governments from inflating savings into dust.
The progressives arrived after 1900 and systematically dismantled each pillar: the income tax in 1913, the Federal Reserve in 1913, regulatory agencies multiplying through the 1920s. Growth slowed. Then the Fed contracted the money supply and Congress passed Smoot-Hawley, and you got 1929. The state caused that collapse and later blamed it on the free market.
Paul Thibodeau retweeted
Switzerland has 26 cantons, each with its own constitution, tax rates, and laws, and the result is one of the wealthiest, most stable countries on earth. That is not a coincidence.
You want to understand why Swiss GDP per capita sits around $92,000 while the EU average hovers near $37,000? Start here. Cantons compete for residents and businesses the same way firms compete for customers. Zug kept its corporate tax rate at roughly 11.9%, attracted commodity traders and crypto firms, and watched its population and tax revenues grow. Cantons that taxed aggressively lost mobile capital and productive citizens to neighbors with lighter burdens. This is Tiebout competition working in real life, not a textbook diagram.
The federal government in Bern handles defense, monetary policy, and some foreign affairs. Everything else defaults downward. Cantons set income taxes. Communes set property levies. Citizens in Appenzell Innerrhoden voted on local laws by a show of hands in the Landsgemeinde, an open-air assembly, until 1990 for most matters. The feedback loop between decision-makers and the people paying for those decisions stays tight. That tightness disciplines spending in ways no central auditor ever will.
Free market thinkers have stressed this for generations: political units must be small enough that exit is credible. When the cost of leaving a bad jurisdiction drops, politicians face real consequences for bad policy. Switzerland kept that cost low by design. A business or family in Basel-Stadt dissatisfied with cantonal policy drives forty minutes to Baselland. No visa. No language barrier. No bureaucratic labyrinth. Just a move.
The EU spent decades building the opposite architecture, consolidating regulatory power in Brussels and eliminating the jurisdictional diversity that forces governments to stay honest. Switzerland refused to join. Its per-capita wealth, its low public debt, and its functional civil society arrived because the Swiss preserved the one institutional feature every centralized state destroys first: the credible right to leave.
