Why wouldn't it make it worse? It multiplies their power by making it much easier to leverage wealth. It doesn't chip away at the power of the merchants as a class at all, it massively reinforce them, even if it might force some new blood in that class.
I'm pretty sure they're pushing for this, the idea that this is a blow for them is coming out of nowhere and supported by nothing.
Well, for one thing because they already have access to currency if they want, via Sanctuary. Adding a general currency makes trade in general easier, simpler, and more convenient. It makes interacting with the economy more efficient and require less expertise. That makes the merchant's lives easier, sure, but it also allows non-merchants to interact with it at all without going through a merchant.
Right now, interacting with the economy requires going through a specialist (ie: a Merchant). Removing the need for that specialist for easy tasks absolutely improves the lives of the specialists (as they don't have to constantly deal with the same pedestrian requests), but it also diminishes their power slightly, as they are no longer a bottleneck in the ability of others to access the economy.
Like, being the bottleneck in a distribution chain is kind of subjectively awful, while simultaneously being objectively powerful. This removes the bottleneck.
Genuine question if you think this is the case. Why didn't this cause a eruption of social mobility and weakening of merchant power, rather then its immense strengthening in real life?
Giving currency to everyone rather than a few people (which is the current situation in this Quest...merchants already have currency access pretty explicitly if they want it)
did cause a huge eruption of social mobility in real life. The rise of the merchant class as a thing in real life was one of the first steps in eroding the power of the hereditary nobility and, at least early on, one of the few ways for non-nobles to get power. There were certainly also a wide variety of horrible side effects due to, well, a lot of different things but peasants suddenly having a way to acquire resources that wasn't 'inherit land somehow' was pretty unambiguously a big increase in their social mobility.
It didn't weaken merchant power in real life because, in real life, merchants were not the ones who had an effective monopoly on having capital before currency became widespread, that was the nobility. The merchant class in this Quest, despite being called that and interested in economics, actually bears precious little resemblance to any real world merchant class due to the utter absence of hereditary nobility and have sort of organically taken over some of the advantages of that real world social class in its absence.
Like, real world merchants have never enjoyed the kind of monopoly those of the True People are enjoying right now. Every time some group has, removing it has cost the group that does have such a monopoly some degree of their power. Usually given to the new groups most inclined to make use of their new advantages. In real life, that beneficiary was certainly generally the merchants...but just because the real world merchant class and that of the True People share a name doesn't mean they work the same, the two are extremely divergent in a variety of ways and acting like anything that was good for real world merchants will likewise be for the merchant class of the True People is simply not true.
What specific difference do you think exist in true people society 5o make this turn out differently? Keep in mind, if you think this is tradition and social values, a great many if not all of these traditions and values were heavily present in the societies I spoke about too, in places where merchants weren't even necessarily at the top of the totem people, even in places that placed a hedecision making. Community consensus in decisionmaking.
It's mostly what I go into above. The core thing is that equating the Merchant Class of the True People with real world merchant classes is not a good idea. They're too divergent in terms of history, power bases, and what privileges they possess. Equating them to hereditary nobility is actually probably closer, in terms of where they derive their power from, though that's not actually even close to right either.
As another factor, a lot of people are also assuming that currency directly equates to, say, private property when that's not actually true. I mentioned before the idea that groups rather than individuals would be the ones who got to accumulate and use currency, and I think that's a pretty plausible direction for the True People to go. Not necessarily a better one, but a different enough one that things would go very differently.
And finally, I'd like to reiterate that this isn't actually introducing currency, it's standardizing it. Right now, Sanctuary has currency (and one that has to be decently stable with at least some basic commodities given they are part of the same polity) and merchants thus have easy access to it and can use it as they see fit. Only random people on the street are unfamiliar with it...economists, merchants, and so on are already using it.
These things did not prevent the repeated, over and over across desperate societies, trends I spoke of.
What specifically prevents them in the case of the True people?
It's not so much that anything prevents them from going that way per se as it is that I think you're equating groups and situations that don't actually map to each other very well. The Merchant Class of the True People are just not the same kind of social class as any real world merchant class, and thus does not act the same or benefit from the same sorts of things.
And again, I'm not saying that currency will magically solve problems, but I have a hard time seeing how
reducing their ability to halt everything by simply not doing their jobs makes merchants
more powerful.
