Well, that’s the difference between plutarchy and plutocracy, isn’t it? Especially since Imperials are all so rich and so avoidant of using that wealth against fellow sophs that the distinction is only meaningful outside the Empire.
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You want to be careful with that one.
The injunctions of the Plutarch’s Code, the Golden God, and the ciseflish Path of Ever-Growing Plenitude (which very heavily influenced the former, trading highly on the marketplace of ideas both figuratively and literally) are against cheating. One would never, for example, secure legal monopolies, or try to regulate one’s competition out of business, or default on contracts, or go back on one’s word, or play games with tariffs and subsidies, or engage in actual violence or sabotage or other things that are thuggish and unmerchantly and interfere with other sophs’ sacred right to seek profit wherever they may find it.
On the other hand, as cooperation is a fundamental necessity of trade, so is competition. That’s how one identifies one’s mistakes, or more accurately, everyone’s mistakes which are reducing the value added to the universe, or worst of all, subtracting value from it.
(It’s all about Entropy, after all.)
So those same plutarchs who would never, ever dream of interfering with each other’s sacred right to seek profit, on the one hand, and will cheerfully cooperate with each other in joint ventures, and offer each other warm friendship and hospitality will also cheerfully run each other out of business if they think there’s an opportunity to be had and someone’s failing in their corresponding duty to reap the market’s bounty and add value to the universe - and the person on the receiving end of this market correction will be grateful for it¹.
Because they were wrong, and now they can be right, and their ledger is going to look better in the final accounting because of it.
I do recall having heard of some OTL operation to the effect of “we’re going to try to do it at all, to show that this is actually a thing that can be happening”. And then they got outcompeted by a bigger company and were happy that this established their weird idea as part of reality, even if they were no longer in control of it.
(IOTL that kind of thing also ~frequently goes horribly wrong when the newly established Big Project starts looking for profit at the expense of public good. Which is… I was about to ask why it’s not also something that happens all the time in the Empire, before I stumbled on this version of the phrasing.)
Alas, the annoyance of having to process one’s anticompetitive economic shenanigans through the same psychic circuitry as “I could totally win a gold medal at the Olympics - if all the other competitors were required to start half a mile back and I broke all their kneecaps first.”