Truly a bargain at 37.4 million pounds.

So the BBC is reporting today that the Monarchy costs about 37.4 million pounds a year. They break that cost down by telling each taxpayer that they each essentially pay 62p a year for the pleasure of maintaining the powerless figurehead and her family.

The Queen and her family are independently wealthy anyway, with Prince Charles making a reported 14 million pounds in 2005 (not bad for a guy who apparently travels extensively and plays polo). It makes you wonder how much the Queen herself is worth.

Well, as the Sex Pistols sang so many years ago, "God Save the Queen, Because Tourists Are Money..." The English monarch is worth more to England enthroned than she would be reduced to commoner, as the untold tourist dollars pour into the country to watch them changing guard at Buckingham Palace, lining the streets for perhaps a glimpse of HRH, and of course just the touristy love to soak in the mythical resonance of the monarchy itself (and interestingly enough, many of those tourists come from the US, who forcibly threw off the monarchy and all its trappings a few hundred years back).

The English monarchy survived the period of revolution and managed to make it past irrelevance to the largely safe waters of historical tourism. It's one thing to tour a palace once inhabited by a royal family deposed and beheaded long ago; it's quite another to walk through the Palace inhabited by a living -- if powerless -- monarch.

I'm not defending the monarchy, but merely the idea that the English monarchy is a cornerstone of British tourism and exists at the public expense mainly as a marketing expenditure. The king is a thing, as Hamlet would say, and like most fetishized commodities, it has an exchange value far higher than its use value.