Letter from Switzerland to the U.S. Congress

Posted by Marc Hodak on March 13, 2009 under Collectivist instinct | Read the First Comment

The Swiss are a peaceful, congenial people.  They don’t like to ruffle feathers.  They would just as soon be left alone to run their own affairs and stay out of others.  And they are much too polite to tell the Americans where they should take their requests for access to Swiss accounts.

Here is how I think they would respond if they weren’t so politic:

Dear Barack Obama, Timothy Geithner, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and Kim Jong-Il:

We understand your problem.  You want to tax your citizens where ever they are.  If they are taking dollars or won on which they have already been taxed, placing them in foreign banks that are investing them in foreign companies, getting back euros or yen or rubles from places that don’t benefit from your institutions of justice, defense, or infrastructure, you want a cut of that, too.  Fair enough.

Nevertheless, the Swiss government is not an arm of your governments.  Our banks are not subsidiaries of your tax collection units.  We are perfectly willing to cooperate in apprehending suspected criminals when you have provided specific evidence that conform with our extradition treaties. However, we see no reason to indulge your political prosecutions with fishing trips through our confidential files in the hope of finding new people to indict.  We don’t, as your youngsters say, roll that way.

In short, keeping a tab on your citizens is not our problem, just as we don’t ask you to keep tabs on ours.  We are quite satisfied with that arrangement, even if you are not.  And while every other nation in the civilized world recognizes our sovereign rights to regulate our institutions as we see fit, we are very sorry that our regulations get in the way of your witch hunts.

We earnestly believe, as does anyone who is not invested in maximizing income from their taxpayers, that the fundamental problem is not our bank secrecy laws, which only apply to Swiss banks in Swiss territory, but your tax laws which apply to the far-flung assets of otherwise free American nationals in every part of the globe. Your insistence that you, alone among all civilized nations, and most others besides, feel you have a claim on extraterritorial profits is the ultimate source of this unfortunate friction.

While we do not subscribe to any conspiracy theory of American hegemony, these vocal threats in a naked grab at money is as counterproductive to your nation’s image as it is to our relationship.  (We are, of course, exempting Mr. Kim from this particular cirticism, since he has not recently threatened any of our businesses.)

Having seen the attitude of the U.S. government towards the rest of the world, we should not be surprised at the stridency of your arm-twisting in a matter important only to your government.  We expected better from an Obama administration.

But please note with all due respect, we will not sacrifice our principles, however you and third world dictators may self-servingly characterize them, to your dominating demands.  There have been many governments that wished to get their sweaty, pudgy hands on information or assets stored in Swiss vaults.  We have kindly told them all to take a hike (in our lovely Alpine hills, of course, with tram rides and other attractions.)  When we were surrounded by fascist dictators on every side trying to bend us to their nefarious aims, we made what relatively few compromises we had to for our survival, but we did not surrender to them.

As such, we will not give up a significant source of our long-term competitive advantage in order to satisfy the immediate needs of your treasury.

We hope you enjoy the enclosed chocolates, with our very best regards.

Oops, my Breitling tells me it’s time to go!