Dear Editor,
Great Britain has historically had a foolproof method of dealing with corruption: it just legalized it.
A scheme of granting titles and vast landholdings to violent chieftains who helped suppress the peasantry and extend the writ of a foreign king has now developed into an honor system so prestigious that people all over the world fawn over it. That’s what I call good PR.
Is it time for a hereditary monarchy based on the notion of superiority by birth to be abandoned in a country with (dubious) pretenses of world leadership in democracy and the rule of law? Probably.
But the institution so mesmerizes some outsiders that it is widely held to be a major driver of tourism in the UK. And when did such considerations ever merit getting in the way of good profits?
At the end of the day, it is neither my business nor interest how the UK constitutionally orders itself.
As for The Bahamas, the most compelling reason I can think of for not wasting the energy required to dump the monarchy is that there are too many real and tangibly harmful remnants of our inequitable past (like our regressive tax system, policing that emphasizes population control over public safety and the unfinished business of universal healthcare) to be distracted fixing an ultimately empty and symbolic one.
— Andrew Allen
