Story concept: AU where capitalism actually works the way the illiberal left thinks it does. Almost the entire economy is still medieval peasants in mud huts; their crops are scarce and valuable but merchants' buying prices bear no relation to supply/demand; kings have iPhones.

I still can't get over that one isekai story I read where prices are set by contests between a Raise Price skill and a Lower Price skill. I mean, not the author's fault that our civilization can't do econ education, but that is Not Where Prices Come From.

To be clear, the AU premise is that market *mechanics* work like the illiberal left thinks - eg, merchants/employers are "greedy" and being "greedy" means you can set prices as high or as low as you want - and then we neutrally extrapolate the results of those mechanics.

"Kings have iPhones" = it's more profitable to restrict supply, raise prices, and sell to a few, than to scale up production and sell to many; capitalists do this if govt doesn't prevent; Apple responds to this incentive by only building one iPhone and selling it to a king.

People live in mud huts = there actually *are* powerful evil forces that have the ability to set people's standards of living, who prefer that people be weak and cowable; but instead of randomly creating some homeless people and then stopping, they just keep going, why not.

Nice division of reactions between "Nobody on the left believes this strawman" and "Lol so you mean the modern-day world then". (To be clear, my sympathies lie more with the first set of responders - they're not responsible for what their Actual Strawmen evil clones believe.)