Part
2 and
3. He correctly identified weaknesses in their system:
...for example, the popular initiative which called for a reduction in military spending and the use of the money for social purposes, was canceled. The government's argument was that the financing of the army and the financing of social affairs are two independent issues that cannot be conflated in one referendum.
The argument sounds reasonable. But then one notices that some of the constitutional changes initiated by parliament are cheerfully mixing changes in various parts of the constitution. The system is unbalanced in this respect and the problem has not been solved yet.
As always, rules for thee, not the gubbmint.
In Eastern Europe and, I guess, in many other places, reporting to authorities is seen as morally wrong. There is a kind of stubborn popular solidarity in resistance to power. We may have inherited that attitude from the times when ratting on someone meant that men in leather trench coats arrived early next morning and dragged the victim to Gulag. (I've even heard a story about a small Slovak town where, shortly after World War II, people began reporting their personal enemies to the Russians, claiming that they were Nazi collaborators. Russians had no clue and incarcerated every reported person. The feud spiraled out of control and several hundred people ended up in jail.)
Swiss, on the other hand, don't perceive authorities as necessarily hostile. If a neighbor violates a rule (and people have quite likely voted for that rule or at least haven't objected when it was introduced) he should be warned first, and if that doesn't help, reporting him to the authorities is seen as fully justified. Nothing terrible is going to happen anyway. Most likely, the authorities are just going to ask the person in question to behave.
The Swiss will be eaten alive when they get run over by the next Napoleon.