This week I present to you Panama, a small Latin American country few Pakistanis could have accurately pinpointed on a map two months ago. Yet today, Panama dominates the local news cycle, thanks to a deluge of leaked financial documents from the law firm Mossack Fonseca. These so-called Panama Papers allege fiscal malfeasance by many global power players, including the children of Prime Minister (PM) Nawaz Sharif, through a network of ‘letterbox’ companies abroad. In his televised address to the nation on April 22, the second of a quick-fire string after the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) published the leaks online two weeks earlier, PM Sharif finally gave in to opposition demands for an inquiry commission helmed by the Chief Justice of Pakistan to probe money laundering allegations against his family arising from the Panama Papers. The premier, however, remained defiant even in retreat, vowing, “If charges are proved against me, I will resign immediately,” and hinting that “…again, certain elements are attempting to destabilise Pakistan,” something pundits took as a reference to the army. Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) chief and Sharif nemesis, Imran Khan, nonetheless flayed the PM’s announcement, calling the commission an ‘eyewash’. Khan now threatens to march on the Sharif estate in Raiwind flanked by thousands of partisans unless Islamabad rethinks the scope of this commission and agrees to develop its Terms of Reference (ToRs) by political consensus. Above all, he wants accountability to start with the PM and his children, and not lumped together with 200 other Pakistanis named in the Panama Papers since that would throw the investigative timeline in limbo. Political theatre aside the Panama Papers confirm what we all know from experience. That we, as humans, are hardwired to avarice. Indeed, capitalism, an economic system designed to create income inequalities, owes its longevity to this dark crevice of human nature. The Catholic Church calls greed a cardinal, soul-crushing sin, the kind that looks back at you from Nietzsche’s abyss. Free-markets themselves are, undoubtedly, the engines of industry, but when left to entrepreneurs lacking scruples, quickly mutate into plutocracies. Pakistan, as every columnist’s pet refrain goes, is a classic plutocracy where the concentration of education and wealth in the hands of a few created a parasitic web of patronage and privilege that no number of PTI sit-ins will fix. In reality, Pakistani politicians as a group, including Khan, are way too rich to run a poor country like ours because they have no perspective. Consider this for a second: Pakistanis have a median income of roughly Rs.12,000 per month while their premier is a multibillionaire. Can PM Sharif truly relate to an average Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) voter running the 9-to-5 rat race everyday? Democracy, in theory, is kryptonite for wanton capitalism. It creates a “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” as storied US president Abraham Lincoln preached at Gettysburg in 1863, where self-indulgent rulers get kicked to the curb by a politically conscious electorate. Not so in plutocracies, though, thanks to the parasitic web I mentioned earlier that installs the elites as gatekeepers to both business and bureaucracy for perpetuity. This, in turn, breeds cronyism and corruption since people need to get things done, and making a pilgrimage to your local influential is the only surefire way. Now, before laissez-faire lovers everywhere decide to troll me to tears, hear me out. No, actually, hear French economist Thomas Piketty out, whose life’s work focuses on rationalising income disparity in capitalist states. Piketty’s bestselling, 700-page tome Capital in the Twenty-first Century, first published in 2013, offers a startling thesis on why the rich keep getting richer and the poor keep plummeting further in the red. Citing 200 years of economic data, Piketty concludes that invested capital — such as in stocks or real estate — always grows faster than income. Since you obviously need money to make more money, people reliant on fixed paychecks will never catch up to the already wealthy. The capitalist game, hence, is rigged to favour old money. Piketty’s work also refutes claims that rapid technological progress in the 21st century, a phenomenon capitalists attribute to their selfless risk-taking, has closed the worldwide wealth gap. On the contrary, it continues on an upward trajectory, especially since the 2008 financial crisis. This has stark implications for society, especially plutocratic ones like ours where the only code the uber-rich abide by is honour among thieves. Middle-class households, meanwhile, bombarded by blatantly consumerist advertising work themselves to death hoping for upwards mobility. However, since their nest egg is usually too small to hedge, the next inevitable economic bust completely savages their savings. Even a gilded testament to capitalism like South Korea has not escaped its social repercussions. The country is second only to impoverished Guyana in annual suicide rates and, more alarmingly, killing oneself is the number one cause of death for Koreans aged 10-30. Forget the Panama Papers, the question Khan needs to ask himself before he mobilises yet another long march is why PM Sharif keeps winning elections — in 2013, coincidentally, with a 55 percent national turnout not seen since the 1980s — despite a long trail of graft charges going back decades. He was, after all, dismissed in his first term as premier by the then president, Ghulam Ishaq Khan for this very reason. I also do not buy Khan’s claims that Pakistani voters were blind to ill-gotten wealth before he burst onto the scene. Nobody is that naive. Unfortunately, plutocracies fuelled by immoral capitalism do not vanish simply because you will them to, and the PTI has its own share of wealthy bandwagoners that may well jump ship if better prospects beckon. Degrading plutocracies takes decades, if not centuries, or, alternately, the iron fist of an honest despot. For if there is one immutable fact of life, it is that the rich will do anything to stay rich. The writer is an Islamabad-based freelance journalist