The Gardening Tool of A Spade is a gargantuan, efficient nation, ruled by a balance of diligence and leisure with an iron fist, and notable for its ritual sacrifices, public floggings, and punitive income tax rates. The hard-nosed, cynical, humorless, devout population of 26.18 billion Spadeans 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 government — a sprawling, bureaucracy-choked, corrupt, well-organized morass — prioritizes Law & Order, with Defense, Public Transport, and Industry also on the agenda, while Welfare and Social Policy aren't funded at all. It meets to discuss matters of state in the capital city of The Tool Shed. The average income tax rate is 72.6%, and even higher for the wealthy.

The very strong Spadean economy, worth a remarkable 1,037 trillion dirts a year, is extremely specialized and mostly made up of the Pizza Delivery industry, with significant contributions from Tourism. Black market activity is frequent. Average income is 39,616 dirts, and evenly distributed, with the richest citizens earning only 2.0 times as much as the poorest.

Piracy is the nation's most popular pastime, military spending is on the increase, torture is commonly used to extract information from suspected criminals, and the country has been 'going shopping' by annexing nearby nations for their resources. Crime is totally unknown, thanks to the all-pervasive police force. A Spade's national animal is the spade, which frolics freely in the nation's many lush forests, and its national religion is tellurian.

A Spade is ranked 73,298^th in the world and 3^rd in The Skeleton Army for Lowest Crime Rates, with 69.57 law-abiding acts per hour.