The Armed Republic of South Cheap is a massive, orderly nation, ruled by Diodato Petrov the Great with an iron fist, and remarkable for its lack of airports, ubiquitous missile silos, and suspicion of poets. The hard-nosed, hard-working, cynical, humorless, devout population of 2.359 billion South Cheap are kept under strict control by the oppressive government, which measures its success by the nation's GDP and refers to individual citizens as "human resources."

The large, corrupt, moralistic, well-organized government juggles the competing demands of Defense, Administration, and Healthcare. It meets to discuss matters of state in the capital city of New Atom. The average income tax rate is 69.7%.

The frighteningly efficient South Cheapian economy, worth 330 trillion Rubrums a year, is broadly diversified and led by the Information Technology industry, with major contributions from Uranium Mining, Arms Manufacturing, and Book Publishing. Black market activity is rampant. Average income is an impressive 140,026 Rubrums, and evenly distributed, with the richest citizens earning only 4.8 times as much as the poorest.

A milk bath costs more than bathing in money, mystics are claiming that a simultaneous rise in scepticism and education budgets is correlation rather than causation, political activists are routinely executed, and the nation's interest in space is at an all-time high while interest in saving the planet is at an all-time low. Crime, especially youth-related, is totally unknown, thanks to a well-funded police force and progressive social policies in education and welfare. South Cheap's national animal is the Red Peacock, which teeters on the brink of extinction due to widespread deforestation, and its national religion is Children Of Atom.

South Cheap is ranked 24,058^th in the world and 19^th in Concord for Most Subsidized Industry, scoring 6,454.7 on the Gilded Widget Scale.