Voters in the Swiss city of Lucerne voters have overwhelmingly rejected a basic income experiment. Some 69% of voters turned down the people’s initiative at the weekend.
In total, 13,457 people rejected the test, while 6,003 voters were in favour. The voter turnout was 37%.
The initiative of a non-party committee wanted to test the model of an unconditional basic income locally for its usability in an urban, scientifically supported pilot project.
A group of people would have received a basic monthly income for at least 36 months, regardless of their assets, income and professional status. There was no provision for anything in return. …
Guns for each citizen and no hand outs! Sounds like a conservative dream country. No wonder they were natural allies for Nazis by doing all the paperwork to hide their wealth. Sunshine laws on the banks would go along way to showing actual war crimes.
The reality is that Switzerland is a conservative backwater that is getting by because it has money, like Saudi Arabian or UAE. This means that the Swiss have a class of people they hate and generally make life hell for them. Conservatives are anti-democracy and inhumane when it’s convenient or they can get away with it.
I’m not saying you’re wrong with many of these, but we do have a couple of very strong, specialized industries that require a lot of know-how. The high quality of life and low taxes attracts the talent and the companies that aren’t grown here.
However, and this is where I can’t deny some of what you say, we have quite a few holes we just never seem to address properly. We are currently struggling with having enough educated workers for our flourishing economy and we rather brain-drain our neighbors than actually paying for it ourselves. Here we clearly benefit from the access to the EU market without participating ourselves. Also this problem falls completely against the immigration policies the right-wing government has or wants to enact.
Another factor is having kids: Clearly one of the worst country in Europe to have kids based on benefits, work-life balance and cost of pre-school care facilities.
Which brings me to the last point I want to bring up: Rising health costs and especially increasing costs of government help for private health insurance providers. Come on: Clearly a broken system that will not be fixed with iterative, conservative changes. It ties back to the lack of nursing staff and soon also doctors, but it also ties into government aid in general: Back when basic income was voted on nationally one of the clear arguments against it was that we have a lot of well-functioning institutions for aid and the initiative did not address what would happen to them. Now that we see this system slowly breaking down, the lack of interest in more radical solutions is really frustrating and reminds of the conservative and opportunist mindset we have in Switzerland. Is there really going to be a cheap solution coming up that we can exploit or do we actually need to get our hands dirty and start experimenting on our own solutions. I do believe that we have the know-how. We lack the will and courage.