- Pronouns
- She/Her
So are the bonuses and maluses cumulative, or does each one have to be added separately?
Running the Economy of the Dragon's Republic (Fantasy PlanQuest)
- Thread starter notbirdofprey
- Start date
- Original
The bonuses and maluses aren't cumulative.
Random Member
Gardener of Human Happiness
- Location
- Behind You
[X] Plan Steady As She Goes, Government Land
-[X] Fight rural poverty (+1 AS)
We need to unfuck everything first before we start to make grand promises. This at least seems like low-hanging fruit, something we can get a lot of progress on simply by focusing on our main goals of rebuilding administration and preventing famine.
-[X] Furthermore, agreeing that churches within Belles should not be beholden to outside powers is reasonable. (+1 AS)
Seems reasonable, we shouldn't let religion be used as a tool by foreign powers who don't like us. Other than that, let them be free. Church lands get yoinked though. Asking for oaths of loyalty I think goes just a step too far for too many people.
-[X] Keep silent. You can just pay workers and accept the cost.
Yeah, don't like the idea of mandatory labor. In the big picture, just paying them is good for the economy. It just sucks for us as the Ministry....
-[X] The land reverts to the government, with the peasantry continuing their tenancy agreements, albeit on better terms.
I'm not sure on this one tbh, think I'm just gonna make two different plans. In any case, I do think it should revert to the government though, it'd be a nice source of income whether we keep it or sell it.
Second plan:
[] Plan Steady As She Goes, Land Reform
-[] Fight rural poverty (+1 AS)
-[] Furthermore, agreeing that churches within Belles should not be beholden to outside powers is reasonable. (+1 AS)
-[] Keep silent. You can just pay workers and accept the cost.
-[] The land reverts to the government, to be sold as plots for individual use. (+2 AS)
-[X] Fight rural poverty (+1 AS)
We need to unfuck everything first before we start to make grand promises. This at least seems like low-hanging fruit, something we can get a lot of progress on simply by focusing on our main goals of rebuilding administration and preventing famine.
-[X] Furthermore, agreeing that churches within Belles should not be beholden to outside powers is reasonable. (+1 AS)
Seems reasonable, we shouldn't let religion be used as a tool by foreign powers who don't like us. Other than that, let them be free. Church lands get yoinked though. Asking for oaths of loyalty I think goes just a step too far for too many people.
-[X] Keep silent. You can just pay workers and accept the cost.
Yeah, don't like the idea of mandatory labor. In the big picture, just paying them is good for the economy. It just sucks for us as the Ministry....
-[X] The land reverts to the government, with the peasantry continuing their tenancy agreements, albeit on better terms.
I'm not sure on this one tbh, think I'm just gonna make two different plans. In any case, I do think it should revert to the government though, it'd be a nice source of income whether we keep it or sell it.
Second plan:
[] Plan Steady As She Goes, Land Reform
-[] Fight rural poverty (+1 AS)
-[] Furthermore, agreeing that churches within Belles should not be beholden to outside powers is reasonable. (+1 AS)
-[] Keep silent. You can just pay workers and accept the cost.
-[] The land reverts to the government, to be sold as plots for individual use. (+2 AS)
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[X] Plan Fighting poverty and illiteracy
-[X] Create a magical education system (+5 AS)
-[X] Fight rural poverty (+1 AS)
-[X] And it's also fair that clergy of all faiths should swear oaths of loyalty, and vow not to abuse their position. (+3 AS)
-[X] Keep silent. You can just pay workers and accept the cost.
-[X] The land reverts to the government, with the peasantry continuing their tenancy agreements, albeit on better terms.
[X] Education and Individual Contracts
[X] Plan Steady As She Goes, Government Land
-[X] Create a magical education system (+5 AS)
-[X] Fight rural poverty (+1 AS)
-[X] And it's also fair that clergy of all faiths should swear oaths of loyalty, and vow not to abuse their position. (+3 AS)
-[X] Keep silent. You can just pay workers and accept the cost.
-[X] The land reverts to the government, with the peasantry continuing their tenancy agreements, albeit on better terms.
[X] Education and Individual Contracts
[X] Plan Steady As She Goes, Government Land
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- Location
- Orlando, Florida
@notbirdofprey Are there any potential or pressing military threats on our borders, such as the various Coalitions of monarchical powers during the French Revolutionary Wars?
Not yet.
Regency
PFP by vanathema (previously yubishines)
- Location
- Morioh Town, Mt. Ebbot
- Pronouns
- They/Them
...no pressure.
[X] Plan Steady As She Goes, Land Reform
Oh yeah, reminder to other plans that it's one option *per category*
- Pronouns
- She/Her
[X] Plan Steady As She Goes, Government Land
I want to be able to improve the efficiency of the land without setting us against the peasants more than necessary.
I want to be able to improve the efficiency of the land without setting us against the peasants more than necessary.
[X] Plan Stand Your Ground
-[X] Create a magical education system (+5 AS)
-[X] Fight rural poverty (+1 AS)
-[X] Stand your ground. Freedom for all, without restriction. (-7 AS)
-[X] Keep silent. You can just pay workers and accept the cost.
-[X] The land reverts to the government, with the peasantry continuing their tenancy agreements, albeit on better terms.
-[X] Create a magical education system (+5 AS)
-[X] Fight rural poverty (+1 AS)
-[X] Stand your ground. Freedom for all, without restriction. (-7 AS)
-[X] Keep silent. You can just pay workers and accept the cost.
-[X] The land reverts to the government, with the peasantry continuing their tenancy agreements, albeit on better terms.
- Pronouns
- He/They
It's not bad, and it's certainly better than just selling it off IMO, but it actually isn't a great way to avoid those problems. Because in the usual planquest assumptions on modernity, significant urbanization is going to happen which means less people in the countryside and more food funneled out of the countryside. That means higher productivity of labor, which means consolidation of land and destruction of traditional peasant society. And that's something that can be more safely managed by starting with a mix of land ownership including state ownership than by doing what the Soviets did and parceling out land at first then reversing course and taking it away to industrialize fast.
That said, it looks like the timeframe is much earlier than most planquests and there's also magic so really who knows how it'll go. I may be assuming too much.
[X] Food and Stability
[X] Plan Steady As She Goes, Government Land
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Solarstream
It's all in the cards
- Location
- Zombie World
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[X] Education and Individual Contracts
avatar11792
Et Sic Incipit
- Location
- Planet Earth, North America
Going to try my hand at this plan thing...
[X] Plan: Economic Basics
-[x] Revitalize the industry of Belles (+8 AS)
-[x] Fight rural poverty (+1 AS)
-[x] Become even more radical and propose that the boundaries of dioceses and parishes be redrawn to align with the administrative structures you will be building. All institutions of the Republic must align with the Republic. (-5 AS)
-[x] Keep silent. You can just pay workers and accept the cost.
-[x] The land reverts to the government, to be sold as plots for individual use. (+2 AS)
We need to keep the economy functioning and people from starving to death so they can be a better labor force. Realigning the church jurisdictions is also to maximize bureaucratic efficiency, though if I could strip church lands I would also do that. All the above will help to pay workers, so that should be good. And selling plots allows for more flexibility in who gets land and gets the government more money in the coffers to find more stuff.
I really want to expand maritime trade and education, but keeping people from starving and in the labor force is more needed right now.
[X] Plan: Economic Basics
-[x] Revitalize the industry of Belles (+8 AS)
-[x] Fight rural poverty (+1 AS)
-[x] Become even more radical and propose that the boundaries of dioceses and parishes be redrawn to align with the administrative structures you will be building. All institutions of the Republic must align with the Republic. (-5 AS)
-[x] Keep silent. You can just pay workers and accept the cost.
-[x] The land reverts to the government, to be sold as plots for individual use. (+2 AS)
We need to keep the economy functioning and people from starving to death so they can be a better labor force. Realigning the church jurisdictions is also to maximize bureaucratic efficiency, though if I could strip church lands I would also do that. All the above will help to pay workers, so that should be good. And selling plots allows for more flexibility in who gets land and gets the government more money in the coffers to find more stuff.
I really want to expand maritime trade and education, but keeping people from starving and in the labor force is more needed right now.
- Location
- Canada
[X] Plan Stand Your Ground
- Location
- Orlando, Florida
This is literally what the Bolsheviks did when they took power.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Understandable.
At the same time, if we're still running on a pre-industrial economic base, there's some... issues with any conceivable means of doing taxation at all.
Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Part I: Farmers!
Thanks to our helpful volunteer narrator, this entire post series is now also available in audio format! This essay will hopefully be the first post in a series (II, III, IV, A) covering some of th…
acoup.blog
The great majority of the population are most likely peasant subsistence farmers. Left to their own devices, they will grow enough food to comfortably feed their own families with a modest margin for error, most of which is diverted laterally to feed other members of their own community who are unlucky enough to have had a bad crop or to not be easily able to feed their family on the available land under current conditions (this lateral support is reciprocal, but over long timescales, potentially generational).
As a rule, the farming population will tend to be long on labor but short on arable land they actually own, which is why "landlord" arrangements are so common.
...
Now, if you are a state, you're in the position of trying to extract some kind of useful support from the peasantry that can be turned into infrastructure projects, armies, schools, and the other things the state does. Many of these are ultimately good for the peasantry too! The peasants cannot farm safely if enemy raiders are pillaging their villages. Good roads and mills will make their lives better in various ways. And widespread education will likewise improve society in the long run. But none of this can happen at all without some form of taxation- somehow, something useful and productive must be extracted from the peasantry and used to sustain these projects.
Taxing the peasants in money is problematic. Peasants have relatively little use for money, because at their level the economy is typically governed mainly by reciprocal obligations, gift exchanges. They are likely to count their wealth in arable land, calories to survive the winter, or both. As such, the only way for them to get money is to sell their crop, which they were planning to eat for sustenance, or to toil as wage laborers on someone else's land.
The peasants are unlikely to have much of a surplus of land on which to raise crops for sale directly because, as noted above, peasant farmers tend to be long on warm bodies and short on land. Because people don't kick out Aunt Mabel to die of exposure just because it's getting a little crowded in the farmhouse. So in effect, taxing them in money is just a roundabout way of forcing them... we'll get to that.
...
So you are left with taxing the peasants in grain. This is a very common solution to the problem- but the peasants were going to eat that grain. Extracting taxes from them in this way forces them to work significantly longer hours (if they even have the land to raise enough grain) or face malnutrition (if they don't). Also, grain is subject to spoilage and there are significant transport costs associated with moving it around much, so it's not a good substitute for money in the national budget. One solution is to tax the peasants in grain and then sell it to merchants (I believe this was common in Eastern Europe and likely elsewhere), but that still leaves you with the problem of hungry peasants.
...
Corvée labor, while not ideal, does provide a way around some of these issues. If the state is either compassionate or not idiotic, it can time the corvée labor for periods of the agricultural calendar when the farmers are not "all hands on deck" working in their fields, most notably harvest. The alternatives to corvée labor are to tax the peasants in grain (forcing them to labor to grow more grain if they even can on the land available) or to tax them in money (forcing them, typically, to agree to perform labor for the state or for large landowners to make the money to pay the taxes).
The former is, again, problematic if you wish to avoid hunger among the peasants. The latter, to paraphrase Rick and Morty, is "corvée labor but with extra steps," steps whose main function is to permit the extraction of additional profits from the peasantry for the benefit of the state, the large landholders, or both.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
How much firepower (pun intended) does Invitrix represent? Is slaying a dragon even remotely realistic for individual heroes who don't come up with something clever like feeding the dragon half a ton of poisoned steak first? Are there cannons? How does a large deployed field army, or whatever passes for one in this setting, stack up against a dragon?
Basically, is Invitrix's protection and willingness to champion the new republic more like giving the republic a nuclear deterrent, or more like giving the republic a few extra artillery batteries in an unusually badass way?
Invitrix is comfortably capable of defeating any single army. Dragons older than two years are nigh-impossible to kill without doing the half-ton of poisoned steak or similar measures. The First Citizen is twenty.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Good to know.
Well, let's keep an eye out for poison in the First Citizen's chimichangas, then!
On the other hand, Invitrix probably isn't unique in the world, so we may have to worry about similarly formidable 'concentrated' threats showing up some day...
- Location
- nz
[X] Plan StarkDemise
-[X] Revitalize the industry of Belles (+8 AS)
-[X] Fight rural poverty (+1 AS)
-[X] Become even more radical and propose that the boundaries of dioceses and parishes be redrawn to align with the administrative structures you will be building. All institutions of the Republic must align with the Republic. (-5 AS)
-[X] Propose that the state be allowed to mandate corvee labor, with sharp limitations to prevent abuse. (-3 AS)
-[X] The land reverts to the government, with the peasantry continuing their tenancy agreements, albeit on better terms.
-[X] Revitalize the industry of Belles (+8 AS)
-[X] Fight rural poverty (+1 AS)
-[X] Become even more radical and propose that the boundaries of dioceses and parishes be redrawn to align with the administrative structures you will be building. All institutions of the Republic must align with the Republic. (-5 AS)
-[X] Propose that the state be allowed to mandate corvee labor, with sharp limitations to prevent abuse. (-3 AS)
-[X] The land reverts to the government, with the peasantry continuing their tenancy agreements, albeit on better terms.
Random Member
Gardener of Human Happiness
- Location
- Behind You
I hardly think that "with the peasantry continuing their tenancy agreements, albeit on better terms" means we're gonna be imposing Stalinist quotas on them or something like that.
Hyacinthium
Writing about sad cannibals as we speak.
- Location
- Bedroom
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[X] Education and Individual Contracts
[X] Plan Steady As She Goes, Land Reform
[X] Food and Stability
[X] Plan Steady As She Goes, Land Reform
[X] Food and Stability
