Recently, my friends and I took a political ideology test on a website called Political Compass. This test assesses how fiscally liberal or conservative you are and how authoritarian or libertarian you are on a multi-axis chart based on your responses to 61 questions.
Fiscally, I was almost certain that I would have fallen a smidgen left of center. But much to my surprise, I was labeled a fiscal conservative. This caught me totally off guard until I took a look at the scale, which placed President Obama to the right of me and Mitt Romney only very slightly to the right of him.
At first I thought that this scale is completely ludicrous, but on further analysis it makes a lot more sense than it seems at first glance because, internationally speaking, even the most liberal politicians in the United States are still pretty conservative.
If you think that a universal healthcare system is a radical or socialist idea, consider two policy proposals given in Switzerland that made headlines around the world: a basic income and a 12:1 executive to worker pay ratio.
A basic income, proposed to eradicate poverty and backed by 125,000 Swiss signatures, is a salary given by the government simply for being a citizen of a nation and being alive
This concept is likely completely alien to Americans who are constantly belabored about the waste associated by the welfare state.
But like Romney and Obama being nearly identical on a political scale, it makes much more sense after further investigation than at first glance. Many argue that it is simply a more efficient way of delegating funds to the needy that the large federal bureaucracy that we currently have in the U.S.
In an analysis of welfare spending, Republican Congressman Jeff Sessions pointed out that the sum of the means-tested welfare spending is approximately $1.03 trillion a year.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are 46.5 million Americans living in poverty.
This means that if we assumed that all welfare spending goes to the poor (which most of it does), we could, instead of administering welfare the way we do it, simply give each American in poverty a check of about $22,150 a year — much less than those receiving benefits actually get.
This is perhaps why libertarian pundit Charles Murray and economist and Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman publicly support a basic income policy.
Proponents of the basic income policy argue that the basic income would be just enough to allow citizens to live comfortably enough to survive without work but just uncomfortable enough to make them want to make more money.
The second of proposals which epitomize the divide between American liberalism and Switzerland’s liberalism is a 12:1 salary ratio. This is a policy which stipulates that the highest-paid company employee can’t make more than 12 times what the lowest-paid employee makes. In other words, the highest-paid employee can’t make more in a month than the lowest-paid employee can make in a year.
This policy is born in response to the increase in corporate profits which have soared in recent years, and the ever increasing wealth disparity between the rich and the poor which has become a very serious political issue in Switzerland in the past 10 years.
Supporters of this policy said structuring the pay system in such a way sets a standard for corporate social responsibility to workers rather than setting a dreaded maximum salary.
To be clear, I am not in support of any of the aforementioned policies, at all. I am, like nearly every other country in the industrialized world, in support of a universal healthcare system; and if you think that makes me or anyone who thinks similarly to me regarding that issue a socialist, you are sadly and grossly misinformed.
