The comparison feels off because it treats Switzerland and the United States as interchangeable test cases for “free market vs. not,” when they operate under completely different constraints.

Switzerland is a small, highly cohesive country with strong local governance, high trust, and tightly scoped systems. The U.S. is a continental-scale federation with massive regional variation, different institutional layers, and far more heterogeneous populations.

At that scale, you’re not comparing “policy choices,” you’re comparing system complexity. Many policies that work in Switzerland don’t fail in the U.S. because they’re bad, they fail because they don’t scale cleanly across 330M people and 50 semi-autonomous states.

So using Switzerland as a counterexample to critique U.S. market dynamics isn’t really isolating “free markets” as a variable, it’s bundling in size, governance structure, and social cohesion, then attributing the difference to ideology. I know Switzerland is great, I've been there, but it feels like a bit of an unfair dunk and very much "punching down".