The annual auction

On 2 September the trustees of the Alaska Permanent Fund approved the year's audited accounts: a return of 12.42 per cent after fees, a balance of 91.9 billion dollars at 30 June and 8.2 billion dollars of realised income moved into the reserve the legislature draws on. On 1 October every eligible Alaskan, more than six hundred thousand people, receives 1,000 dollars of it, plus a separate 200-dollar energy payment. It is the forty-fifth dividend in a row since 1982, and the accounts close a season the legislature settled in May.

The formula in statute would have paid about 3,800. How 3,800 became 1,000 is chapter 8 run as a live experiment.

The book holds Alaska up as one half of a working citizen stake. The 1976 constitution locks the principal. The 1982 dividend made ownership felt and built a constituency to defend it. What Alaska never built is the second lock: the dividend sits inside the annual appropriation, as the state's supreme court confirmed in 2017 in Wielechowski v. State of Alaska, and its size is settled each year, in the chapter's phrase, by an annual auction.

This year's auction ran as follows.

In January, in his final year, Governor Mike Dunleavy proposed a constitutional amendment, introduced in the House as HJR 30: half the fund's annual draw to dividends, half to the state and the earnings reserve folded into the protected principal. It was the second lock, more or less as the chapter describes it. It needed two-thirds of both chambers and a referendum. It was referred to House Finance on 23 January and died there when the session ended on 20 May.

In April the House Finance Committee voted the full 3,800, funded by 1.4 billion dollars from a Constitutional Budget Reserve of about 3 billion. Half the state's savings for one cheque. A draw on that reserve takes three-quarters of each chamber, and the committee's other co-chair, who voted against, said plainly that the votes were not there. The House settled on 1,500 and the Senate on 1,000 with a smaller energy payment. On 17 May a conference committee took the Senate's dividend and raised the energy payment to 200, four votes to two. The governor signed the budget on 24 June, vetoed close to 90 million dollars elsewhere and left the cheque alone.

Outside the building, Bill Walker, the governor who halved the 2016 dividend and lost his office over it, is running again on a one-off payment of 10,000 dollars, about 6.5 billion by his campaign's arithmetic, after which the programme would end. Not a cut. A buyout.

Score the book's structure first. The register's test for this claim is whether the payout holds through the political cycle and whether the designed safeguards repel a raid. The cheque was paid for the forty-fifth time. The principal was never in play; the constitution sees to that. The raid came from the dividend side rather than the treasury side, and the three-quarters rule meant it never reached the floor. Nor was the rule tested there: in its account of the 17 May deal the Anchorage Daily News put North Slope crude above 100 dollars a barrel since mid-March and the state's unplanned revenue above 500 million dollars, which removed the deficit that would have forced the showdown. The lock deterred and the oil price excused. On structure the chapter is right. The auction it names is exactly what happened.

Then the chapter's politics. It calls the dividend the third rail of state politics: touch it and you are finished, and its proof is Walker, whose 2016 veto cost him his governorship. That proof still stands. What the chapter did not see is that the rail runs under one office only. A governor who halves the cheque alone is punished. A legislature that votes 1,000 dollars two years running, this year a quarter of formula, spreads the blame across forty seats and twenty, and nobody has been finished for it. The constituency defends the existence of the cheque and has, so far, let the size go.

The two are not the same finding. A chapter can be right that a felt payout keeps a fund alive and wrong about who pays for shrinking it. The conditions the register sets for a confirms were met. The chapter's account of the punishment was not. The institution held and the behaviour that was supposed to protect the cheque's scale did not, so: complicates, on that line.

Two names close the loop. Bill Wielechowski, the senator whose case established that the dividend has no constitutional protection, called the governor's amendment a basis for discussion. Walker, whose veto produced that case, wants to end the dividend with one large cheque. The two men who fought over the second lock in 2016 are back on opposite sides of it, and the lock still does not exist.

Norway, the other half of the book's pair, spends under a rule and mails nobody a cheque. Alaska caps the draw and leaves the citizen's share of it to a vote. The two halves are still split, which is the claim.

November will say whether a constituency can be bought at the right price. If it can, the second lock was the only thing that could have stopped it. Who owns the machine?