"Presumably Nashi had some reason for not doing that? Maybe political instability produces cosmic friction, so it's not in his interest for us to have less of it? I didn't say he wanted what was objectively best for us - just that his will correlates with the long term good. And if Nashi came to us and said 'Actually, guys, I'd rather you not live forever', we would politely hear him out before flipping him off. Unless it was going to literally destroy the universe, or something, and he couldn't tell us that unless it was true, because he made a binding oath to tell no lies before we were willing to accept his covenant."

"Huh. I can't imagine anyone defying the Valar like that. I guess if we had the choice. Maybe that's the difference. The Valar could hurt us, even if they usually don't." She frowns. "Though I'm not sure that's it either. We just trust them."

"Are you sure you should trust them? Just because they're in charge? To be honest, this is probably my Northern cultural influences showing through. Republicanism; liberalism; weak governments - my culture is very distrustful of powerful people telling us what to do for our own good. Our most popular expression, when responding to unfair requests, literally means 'get off my land'. We probably just grew up with very different perspectives on the role of rulers - you as an aristocrat, and me in a country with no aristocracy."

"Probably," she says, "if you have a weak government and things are good you think you should have weak governments. If you have a strong one and things are good, you think you should have a strong one. Also your kind of people and our kind might need different things."

"Those are both quite plausible observations. Have you polled all the people living here to see if they agree that things are good?"

"...polled?"

"You know, asked everyone. Handed out pieces of paper so they could rate how well the government is run. Do you even have suggestion boxes? I mean, if people live a good life under a fair and legitimate government, there's no reason they wouldn't be happy to say so when asked. You might as well confirm how happy people are, like my country does."

She raises an eyebrow. "It seems like it'd just ferment grievances. Like, if you ask people if they have complaints, of course they will. People are not very good at evaluating how a system works and whether it's making tradeoffs well."

"But how do you know if you're trading the right values if you don't ask people what they actually want? What if they want X and don't care about Y, but you traded away X for more of Y? You'll never know until you ask."

"Oh, asking people 'do you care more about roads or hospitals' might be more sensible than asking 'what do you think of the government'. I still don't really expect it'd turn up anything useful compared to, like, considering use of roads and use of hospitals and expenses spent on those things."

"Your government does transportation and health? What do businesses do?"

"Trade with the colonies, and inns and so forth. How would you have businesses do roads, would you have to pay to walk on them?"

"Towns and cities are divided into smaller pieces with a hundred or so families, and they vote to decide things like where buildings are allowed to go. People walk in the space in between. Sometimes that area is paved by volunteers, and sometimes by businesses that want people to have an easy time visiting their stores. In areas of a city where not many people live and it's mostly businesses, the firms negotiate amongst themselves to pave the roads. It's not that hard, since most roads are only about [5 metres] wide, which makes it cheap and fast. There are some wider roads for vehicles, especially between cities, but those are owned by companies and you have to pay to use them. I'm not sure how a government at the level of a city or a state or even a whole country could figure out the best place to build a road. How will they know how many people need it? They aren't the people using it, nor do they have a profit motive to collect the very best information."

"That sounds completely crazy and disastrous and I'm astonished that it works at all. The Crown paves the roads, because we want to know with certainty that all roads will be paved. So you don't have to have different kinds of carts for different jurisdictions."

"...Why do you need all the roads to be paved? What matters is paving the places where people want to walk. I wouldn't want the government to pave a road to somewhere no one is going. And how does the Crown know all the places that need roads? In my country, if someone needs a road, they'll pay for it. Surely you must have at least some private roads, for times when the Crown didn't think it was worth doing, but someone else did? That's just what all our roads are like."

"...I don't think so. If something's worth having a road, it's worth having a proper road. The Elves don't solve problems with money, or didn't in Valinor. It's vaguely embarrassing to resort to that if you needn't."

"That... But... What? You purposefully avoid using the most efficient method of solving allocation problems? Resource allocation problems become exponentially harder as you introduce new utility functions, and you have a country of six million people! Even if there were only two resources people wanted in differing ratios, do you know how long it would take a central planner to find the optimal allocation? Someone get me a pencil, a paper, and a person with a special interest in maths so they can calculate how many years it would take you to solve the actual problem. Please, for the love of all the Deva, if you ignore everything else I've said about governance, please remember this: markets are your friend."

She looks completely bewildered. "Our system works fine. And the Elves don't even have currency!"

"Noooooooooo..." Carmen whines helplessly. "Look, this is only indirectly my forte. My father is the one with a special interest in economics, and he raised me to respect the power of the field. He made me watch every episode of My Little Factory: Markets Are Magic when I was a kid. He made my brother and I bid on where we'd go on the weekends to clearly signal how much we wanted it, because money is the unit of caring. He devised a game in which I traded a stipend of imaginary currency for goods and services at home, and gradually increased the complexity until there were financial derivatives. So, even if this isn't my special interest, I still feel comfortable saying this: If someone gave me a loan and a decade, I could own your island. Please: markets. That is all."

[OOC: Both my parents are econ/finance people and ex-central bankers. The game about trading currency for household goods was an actual thing they did with me from seven to nine years old. I had a unique childhood.]

"I can give you a loan and a decade," she says, giggling. "If your system is better, prove it."

"...Um, that was easy? Like... Maybe too easy? I mean, you... Can you do that?" She turns to look at Gimlith. "She can do that?"

"Of course I can do that. Why couldn't I?"

"Being Elrosian has its benefits," Gimlith says dryly.

"Huh. Um, OK." A command economy, but a relatively unregulated credit market? Or are aristocrats above their own regulations? "Well, I don't yet know how much money I'll need. I'll need to scout economic information, assess the skill sets and wages of people around here, research what the regulatory barriers would be, and so on. Give me a week to come up with a proper business plan and I'll return for the loan. What interest rate should I expect? Or are you looking for equity?"

"Oh, no, I'll just tell people I'm your patron."

"And what does patronage entail in your culture?"