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“I'd rather have roses on my table”

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The World Turned Upside Down of E G Smith is a gargantuan, genial nation, notable for its national health service, smutty television, and stringent health and safety legislation. The compassionate, democratic population of 27.857 billion E G Smithians are free to do what they want with their own bodies, and vote for whomever they like in elections; if they go into business, however, they are regulated to within an inch of their lives.

The government — a sprawling, bureaucracy-choked, liberal, socially-minded, outspoken morass — juggles the competing demands of Education, Welfare, and Social Policy. The average income tax rate is 91.4%, and even higher for the wealthy.

The E G Smithian economy, worth a remarkable 1,967 trillion Libreses a year, is driven entirely by a combination of government and state-owned industry, with private enterprise illegal. The industrial sector, which is highly specialized, is mostly made up of the Tourism industry, with significant contributions from Book Publishing and Information Technology. Average income is 70,640 Libreses, and distributed extremely evenly, with practically no difference between the richest and poorest citizens.

The government is proud to report that ten percent of all tax revenue goes to funding suspected terrorist organizations, Leader is strangely popular with male politicians' wives, veterans are directed into environmental cleanup operations, and the pursuit of wanted criminals ends at the entrance of the pay'n'spray garage as police refuse to enter any private property. Crime is totally unknown. E G Smith's national animal is the Panther, which frolics freely in the nation's many lush forests.

E G Smith is ranked 38,314^th in the world and 1^st in Libcom for Highest Poor Incomes, with 65,642.06 Standard Monetary Units.