This is the Cato Daily Podcast from Monday, December 19th, 2011. I'm Caleb Brown.

Kim Jong-il is dead, but what does he leave behind and whose problem is North Korea now?

Doug Bandau, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, was once an invited visitor to North Korea, he comments.

This is a very regimented society, and much of what they do is choreograph.

They have these mass games and they flip cards and change colors.

So they look and they view it as a showcase. They are convinced this shows their

countries being great and something to be emulated.

So with the the weeping part of that I suspect is genuine people have no idea what to expect they've been told this leadership is wonderful

We saw some of that with the Stalin era

But also a lot of as it expected I mean if you want to survive in that regime you have to demonstrate you're loyal to it.

And one element of loyalty is to act as if you believe this is a godlike man who died,

a man who is essentially your father who is looking after you.

Society like this with the politics that they have, as well as the regimentation and the choreography,

you come up with a spectacle which in the West would be beyond understanding and

that's what we're seeing today. What does he leave behind? What does Kim Jong-il leave?

Well the North Korean political system is based upon myth. I mean the myth of Kim Il-Sung who was the first leader.

He was in fact a guerrilla fighter but he wasn't the man they claimed him to be.

Kim Jong-il, you know, the biography says he was born on a sacred mountain, he wasn't, he was born in Siberia during World War II.

You know, so myth-making is kind of what this regime is based on.

But what he leaves behind, of course, is an impoverished country, a desperately poor people, they're hungry again, they're desperate for food aid.

This is a system that's followed a policy called Military First.

Much of its resources are poured into an oversized military, large army, as well as a nuclear

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