Comment by Herring
4 months ago
Western societies are aging. If you don't take in immigrants (which is basically the government becoming the far right), you're on a timer. Your economy will slow, insecurity will rise, and the far right will surge anyway. It's happening to Japan.
As far as I can tell, the problem is inequality leading to widespread insecurity because the rich buy up housing. The right wing has no solutions. What you probably need is Vienna-style public housing and very high taxes to reduce inequality and fund social services. But then the rich always threaten capital flight to tank your economy.
Switzerland obviously isn't anti-immigrant. Really nobody is from there. Nearly half of their population immigrated. But the SVP wants selected varieties of white immigrants, nobody any darker skinned than David Hasselhoff, certainly not anyone from east of Vienna (the SVP had an entire anti-Kosovar campaign).
My neighbours are a white Dutch couple who have been living in Switzerland for close to 3 decades, but were still denied citizenship at the cantonal level. Every time, it failed at the cantonal level alone.
The co-founder of Bitcoin Suisse too has been struggling to obtain Swiss citizenship.
So again, it's not a question of skin colour or wealth, but a far deeply rooted sense of racism and superiority, and general disdain the SVP and their supporters hold for anyone who isn't German Swiss.
"Line must go up" is such a death wish and I don't see how people who consider themselves "green" can also preach the line must go up mantra. Yes, there are consequences from a shrinking population. There are also consequences from a growing one, especially one that is cultivated with no regard to anything other than maximizing the absolute number. But I guess if you're one of the people who can benefit from the line going up while alive, it doesn't matter what happens to the world once you're gone. Just make sure that line is doing the right thing while you're breathing and that's all that matters.
You won't get anywhere if your solution to climate change is widespread poverty and insecurity. In fact from what I can tell the more secure societies are more likely to push green policies (comparing Europe vs US/China). Intuitively I have more capacity to entertain vegetarianism if I'm not working 80hrs per week. Anyway the rich are emitting way more carbon than everyone else so taxing them should be the first priority, not austerity.
The system they’ve crafted relies on having enough of a working population to pay for the older benefit-receiving population. Their benefits are so large and unwieldy, they know the whole thing will fall apart if they don’t find a way to fund it.
They see this as a threat to their entire way of life.