The Third World’s Evil Overlord List

Recently I excerpted the Evil Overlord’s List (a classic of Internet humor). It consists of advice for evil overlords of the type you read about in sci-fi and fantasy. But ReasonOnline has some advice for real-world, third-world evil overlords.

I mean, you gotta feel for those guys. It’s hard to be an evil overlord in a world where democracy is on the march and the global economy has developed to the point that bone-crushing poverty is the exception rather than the norm. Today if you’re not careful, your people will start entrepeneuring their way to prosperity and then they’ll take a hankering to ideologies that are hard to square with evil overlordism, like . . . democracy.

No, the best thing is to nip this problem in the bud by keeping your people bone-crushingly poor. You need their per capita gross domestic production to be like Korea’s $1,000 or Cuba’s $1,700. Let them get up to America’s $36,200 GDP and they’re sure to overthrow you.

So here’s some advice from ReasonOnline’s evil overlord list for third-world dictators (and the imitators in more developed countries):

First, make sure that your country’s money is no good. Print money like there’s no tomorrow. Hyperinflation is one of the easiest and most popular ways to dismantle an economy. Another popular monetary gambit is to make sure your currency is not convertible. This guarantees that no one will ever want to invest in your country.

To further discourage investment, be sure to nationalize all major Industries. Nationalization has additional poverty-enhancing benefits. For example, it will ensure that the nationalized industries never improve technologically or become more efficient, and it makes workers pathetically dependent on their political masters, namely you.

Of course, you may find it too tiresome to nationalize everything, in which case it is very important that you establish high tariffs that insulate your country’s remaining private industries (usually owned by your cronies anyway) from competition.

In addition, your legal system should make it nearly impossible for anyone to license a new business, however small. This will offer opportunities for your bureaucrats to make a living through corruption and will protect your cronies from domestic competition. An added advantage is that most commerce will be made illegal and subject to arbitrary enforcement.

This leads to the point that property is critical. Once people start to own something, they invest in it and improve it, leading inexorably to the creation of wealth. Again, the legal system can help to make it impossible to issue clear titles so that your citizens can’t buy, sell, or borrow against their "property." Also, force your farmers to sell their crops to government commodity boards at below-market rates. This will discourage them from investing in anything more advanced than subsistence agriculture, and you will be able to sell whatever crops you do seize at low prices to keep the urban populations quiet.

Another popular policy is confiscatory taxes. This strategy, which allows you to claim that you are soaking the rich in the name of equity, has long been fashionable among the genteelly stagnating economies of Europe.

READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE.

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live." View all posts by Jimmy Akin