How supermarkets model kleptocracy
Last week, when I wrote about how depressing I found the Pandora’s Papers, I had a whole plan for this week. Yes, opening Pandora’s Box gave the world Trouble and Woe, as the ICIJ put it, but in the Ancient Greek legend, once all the bad things had flown out, there was Hope too, down at the bottom. So, this week’s newsletter was going to be all about hope, and the outpouring of substantive and imaginative policy proposals that would surely come out in the days after the data dump was unveiled. In retrospect, I recognize that this approach was a bit of a hostage to fortune.
Timothy Noah in the New Republic was certainly imaginative with his suggestion that, to solve the problem caused by South Dakotan trusts’ facilitation of secrecy and tax avoidance, we should get rid of South Dakota.
- “We’ve put up with this moral sewage long enough. Let’s abolish South Dakota by merging it into North Dakota. If Congress has the power under the admissions clause to admit new states, shouldn’t it also have the power to dissolve them? Everybody makes mistakes,” he wrote.
It does seem odd that a state with a population that wouldn’t even put it in the top ten most populous Californian counties should have the same Senate representation as California, but sadly a problem caused by the nexus between venal politicians and greedy citizens isn’t going to be solved by abolishing just one state, no matter how well its voters and their oligarch clients do out of the peculiarities of the U.S. constitution.
I rather like South Dakota, and in an ideal world I wouldn’t have led with Noah’s policy suggestion of scrapping it altogether. It’s just that I didn’t have any choice, since there have been precious few other suggestions about how to solve the problem of kleptocracy and robbery, which is systemic, and best explained, in my opinion, by comparison to a supermarket.