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by chli 4091 days ago
Where did you get the idea that Swiss are obsessed with not paying taxes ? In fact Switzerland and Germany are very similar in all the aspects you mention.
1 comments

I agrree. Being German, it's my impression that the Swiss are even more honest with taxes than the Germans. The general impression in many countries rather is: The Swiss are very honest with their taxes, but don't care about tax honesty about foreigners in their own countries (getting people to be honest about their taxes is a problem that each country has to solve by itself). This is different from the German mentality - also rather honest, but very missionary about tax honesty in other countries (especially the Greek seem to have a serious problem with this ;-) ). As one says humorously in German "Am deutschen Wesen soll die Welt genesen." (freely translated with "The world shall recover by the German quiddity.").
Reminds me of "Weil nicht sein kann, was nicht sein darf." I'm still looking for a pithy English equivalent.

(See http://ingeb.org/Lieder/palmstre.html for the full text of the poem.)