A Brief Note From The Doylist Perspective

[january1may]

@avatar

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.)