Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

by Kurt Andersen

Shortly after Tussing became an Alaskan, North America’s largest deposit of oil was discovered on the North Slope, and oil companies paid the state of Alaska the equivalent of $6.5 billion up front to start drilling, with royalties to follow. The good-looking young Alaska professor, when asked by a reporter how the oil money should be used, said, “The only way to guarantee that the money does any good to most of us is to hand it out to the people.” The new Republican governor agreed, and after personally getting Milton Friedman’s okay, he made it his main political project to amend the state constitution to put a quarter of the state’s oil revenues into a dedicated fund, the Alaska Permanent Fund, then send a dividend check every year to every resident of Alaska, including children. Free money for everyone, no strings attached! Just as the new plan was being finalized, the governor visited China and met with Premier Zhou Enlai, who was just beginning the struggle to move his country’s economic system away from dead-end Communism. “You Alaskans,” Zhou told him, “are more socialistic than we are!” The annual Alaska dividend varies each year, depending on how the fund’s $66 billion worth of investments perform—it was $1,600 per person in 2019 and 2018, or $6,400 each year for a family of four, but it has occasionally reached the equivalent of nearly $3,000 per person and rarely dipped below $1,000. In 2007 another Republican governor got the legislature to pass an even higher...