TVisTV Book 4: Chapter 31 (RAW) (Patreon)

Chapter 31 - A World from the Ashes

If a problem cannot be solved with money, it just means that you do not have enough of it.

- Unknown.

Myeong Mirae sat in her office in Cheong Wa Dae, the Blue House, stretching her long legs beneath the desk before raising both arms above her head. She yawned without bothering to cover her mouth, a small guilty pleasure.

Before her lay a particularly dry book on the economics of this world. She had been reading it against both her own experience and the memories she had inherited, marking its contradictions in red ink. It had, of course, been written by an idiot.

The author maintained that the fortunes accumulated by the wealthiest families were not merely rewards for their virtue, intelligence, and industry, but load-bearing pillars upon which the entire economy rested. Tax them too heavily and investment would flee. Employment would collapse. Innovation would wither, capital would vanish, and civilization itself would shortly follow. It was the oldest lie of the possessing classes: that they had already given all they could, and that asking for anything more would bring the roof down upon everyone beneath it. It was unfair, he proclaimed.

More offensive still was the insistence that they should not be made to give more. That preserving their fortunes was not merely prudent but moral. A noble imperative, even. The rich must remain rich for the sake of the poor.

Mirae turned another page. “Consumer,” she murmured.

What an ugly word.

It reduced the human condition to a mouth attached to a purse: something that ate, purchased, exhausted, and discarded. A creature parasitical in its simplicity. And yet this world’s economists had elevated the consumer to the central pillar of civilization. Without consumption, factories closed, wages disappeared, governments starved of revenue, and the great wheel of commerce ground to a halt. There was some truth in that, irritatingly.

The wealthy might possess the greatest fortunes, but ordinary people spent a far greater proportion of whatever money passed through their hands. Give another won to a poor family and it would be spent on food, clothing, medicine, schooling, rent, or some small pleasure that made continued existence tolerable. Give it to a billionaire and it joined the rest, searching not for goods but for assets—land, houses, shares, debt, anything that might produce still more money without requiring its owner to labor.

When wealth gathered too heavily at the top, demand below weakened. Wages stagnated, shops and small businesses failed, and meanwhile, the surplus fortunes of the rich competed over the things that could not easily be multiplied: land near cities, homes near employment, controlling interests in profitable companies, and the debts of governments.

The poor did not simply possess less money. They were steadily dispossessed of the things money was meant to buy. Housing became an investment before it was a home. Education became debt. Illness became bankruptcy. Every necessity was transformed into an opportunity for someone already wealthy to collect rent, interest, or fees.

Then the economists expressed bafflement when the young stopped marrying, families stopped having children, and citizens lost faith in institutions that appeared to exist solely to explain why nothing could be changed.

However, there was always a cost. The air was filthy, the water poisoned, and the world itself grew hotter with every passing year. Forests burned so that quarterly reports might improve. Seas rose so that men already incapable of spending their fortunes could add another digit to them. And still they told her that matters had improved compared to earlier ages.

She had laughed when she first heard that.

Then she had consulted the histories and discovered, to her annoyance, that it was true. People lived longer, fewer children died, famines were rarer. Literacy, sanitation, medicine, and material comfort had spread further than the kings and emperors of her old world could have imagined. 

An impressive achievement. The system worked, but she felt that it could still be improved upon.

Unfortunately, climate, poisoned seas, collapsing ecosystems were obligations owed to generations that did not yet exist and therefore possessed neither votes nor armies. She would borrow from their future to resolve the dangers of the present. They could curse her later, provided she first ensured that they were born beneath a single Korean flag.

For the moment, she had acquired her war chest.

Her measures had been draconian, certainly, but also spectacularly popular. Polling showed that nearly the entire common population of the Republic of Korea—Daehan Minguk—supported them.

That was what those in the highest reaches of society so often forgot. Power was not born solely from personal strength, wealth, ancestry, or divine mandate. Even tyrants required the cooperation of those beneath them. The lesser orders built the roads, filled the armies, operated the machines, harvested the food, obeyed the laws, and protected their masters from the far larger number of people standing outside the gates.

Authority was the accumulated obedience of millions, and the traditional solution was to ensure that those millions never recognized themselves as a single body. Young against old. Men against women. Native against foreigner. The comfortably indebted against the destitute. Those who owned one small apartment against those who owned nothing. People who differed slightly in color, accent, birthplace, or ancestry were encouraged to regard one another as mortal threats, while those who owned half the country congratulated themselves on the vitality of democracy.

That last division remained particularly difficult for Mirae to understand. She had come from a world in which different sentient races truly existed—beings of different colors of blood, magic, lifespans, and even numbers of limbs. Here, humans found minute variations in skin or facial structure and decided that their neighbors were alien. It was pathetic, but it was also very useful for the ruling classes.

“Why should we pay?” one chairman had demanded during a gathering of the country’s wealthiest families. “We built this nation.”

“No,” Mirae had replied. “You inherited companies built by workers educated in public schools, transported on public roads, protected by public soldiers, and governed by laws written and enforced at public expense.”

The room had gone very quiet indeed.

She continued, her voice filled with not entirely feigned emotion. “Every won you call yours exists because the state recognizes your claim to it. The courts defend your contracts. The police defend your property. The central bank defends your currency. The military defends the country in which any of those claims possess meaning.”

She had smiled at them. “You will pay because order has a price. More importantly, you will pay because I am the only thing standing between you and the people who have begun to realise how much you own.”

Several of them had later called her medieval in her outlook, but Mirae had accepted the accusation as a compliment. Sometimes it takes the solutions of the past, to solve the problems of the future.

And, this Mirae understood something that united the overwhelming majority of people: the hatred born from discovering that an opportunity had once existed and had been deliberately placed beyond their reach.

The figures told the story, though not as simply as the demagogues claimed. If the productive wealth of a country grew by one part while the paper fortunes of its richest families grew by fifteen, it did not necessarily follow that fourteen parts had been stolen directly from the pockets of the poor.

However, Mirae was not an idiot. She understood that much of that increase came from valuation. Shares rose, land appreciated, and houses and land became more expensive. Companies projected greater future profits, and the market priced those expectations into the present. 

But valuations were not imaginary merely because they existed on paper. They represented ownership. They represented the ability to purchase homes, companies, political influence, and the debts of everyone beneath them. They represented claims upon future rents, future interest, future taxes, and future labor.

The country had not become fifteen parts more productive. Instead, a small number of families had merely acquired a vastly greater share of the right to decide who benefited from its productivity. The book called that wealth creation, but Mirae understood it as transfer of ownership disguised by rising prices.

She knew full well of the old policy of taxing peasants so heavily that they could scarcely imagine rebellion. It was effective, up to a point. A man occupied entirely with finding his next meal had little time for politics. But, such extraction methods had limits.

Take too much grain and the peasant concealed his harvest, abandoned his fields, murdered the tax collector, or died. Take too much income from the modern worker and consumption collapsed, debts defaulted, businesses failed, and the state found itself taxing an economy it had already strangled.

A person worked hardest when labor promised some improvement in tomorrow.

Allow people to keep enough of their work and they bought homes, established businesses, raised children, acquired skills, and produced more for the state to tax later. They became invested in the survival of the system. 

The danger was that security gave them time to think. A citizen who no longer feared starvation might begin to ask why another man possessed ten thousand lifetimes of wealth. He might begin to organize. He might decide that obedience was no longer the natural condition of his birth. That was when a ruler gave him an enemy.

Ironically, Mirae had chosen her own class. The ultra-rich. The hereditary owners. The families whose wealth had grown so vast that the ordinary afflictions of mankind barely touched them. They had become soft behind their walls, fattened upon rents, monopolies, inheritances, and government favor. They were, in her eyes, pigs prepared for the festival.

She imposed taxes not merely upon their income but upon their wealth: land, shares, trusts, holding companies, inherited estates, empty apartments, art vaults, and assets hidden beneath layers of legal ownership. A national beneficial-ownership register exposed the men behind the shell companies. Foreign holdings had to be declared. Transfers above certain thresholds required approval. Inheritance exemptions disappeared. Property that could not be justified against reported income became subject to seizure.

Where confiscation proved necessary, she confiscated. The treasures of the great families flowed into the treasury. They threatened to flee, but Mirae made flight irrelevant. Their bodies might cross the border, provided she allowed it. Their factories could not. Their land could not. Their licences, bank accounts, domestic shares, patents, mines, ports, warehouses, and commercial networks remained within her jurisdiction.

A truly punishing exit tax claimed much of whatever wealth they attempted to remove. Capital controls delayed the rest. Banks were ordered to freeze suspicious transfers, and bankers who hesitated discovered that prison cells were far less comfortable than executive offices.

Their children remained enrolled in her schools and universities, accompanied everywhere by discreet government protection. Protection was the proper word, and a hostage ceased to sound like a hostage when the chauffeur wore a government uniform. Appearances, after all, were everything.

Meanwhile, Mirae’s corporations swallowed weakened conglomerates one by one. Some were divided. Others were nationalized, reorganized, or purchased at prices their former owners loudly declared criminal.

There had been resistance at first. The General dealt with its physical expression with an efficiency Mirae found almost frightening. The political resistance fared little better. Officials, judges, prosecutors, journalists, and legislators who had spent decades serving the great families suddenly found their private accounts audited, their communications leaked, and their secret arrangements placed before a public eager for proof of betrayal.

Some were guilty, some, however, were merely inconvenient. The distinction mattered greatly to lawyers and “human rights” activists, but hardly at all to the history she was creating.

There were also the patriots. They acted without orders, officially. They vandalized estates, dragged executives from private clubs, broke through guarded gates, and reminded men accustomed to walls that every wall contained cracks.

The leader of the country publicly condemned such excesses. Her government arrested the perpetrators, prosecuted them according to law, and made a grand performance of preserving order.

However, their families were quietly provided for. The imprisoned patriots understood their purpose. Mirae saw it in their eyes when they were led away: pride, devotion, and the blissful certainty that their sacrifice served something greater than themselves.

They would have died for her, and some already had.

And Mirae had been transparent throughout the entire process. Or at least as transparent as political wisdom permitted. She released records, broadcast seizures, published the names of offenders, and explained each new policy in language simple enough to be repeated around dinner tables and factory floors.

It satisfied a generation that had spent years being lied to by men in expensive suits. Most people would believe almost anything when it was delivered by a beautiful face with sufficient confidence.

And, for the first time in decades, ordinary Koreans began to feel richer rather than merely being informed that the country was rich. Household debts were reduced. Public housing expanded. Wages rose. Families spent money they had previously surrendered to landlords, banks, schools, and medical bills. Small businesses discovered customers beyond the tiny circle of the wealthy. Young people who had assumed they would own nothing began to imagine futures containing homes and children.

Redistribution alone could not create food, steel, energy, or machines. Mirae knew that. Moving claims from one ledger to another altered who could purchase the nation’s production, but it did not automatically increase that production.

For that, she had given them something else. Magic. The Arcane. They called it quantum engineering, or some such, and the young President allowed them the dignity of the lie.

The knowledge she had introduced was only a pale shadow of what had existed in her former world. Mana was thin here, and its principles translated clumsily into the mathematics and machinery of this one. Even so, it shattered limits this civilization had mistaken for natural law. 

New processes reached minerals buried too deeply to extract profitably. The depths of the sea yielded elements once considered too scarce. Energy systems produced power without coal, oil, or imported gas. Desalination, vertical agriculture, new synthetic materials, and automated construction reduced vulnerabilities that had governed the peninsula for generations.

The Republic was not entirely self-sufficient, for no complex nation truly was. But it could survive a blockade, and it could enact a siege if necessary. And, that was sufficient for her purposes. Winning wars were not always about winning, but sometimes about losing less over time.

Under her stern gaze, wealth flooded into the country. Factories multiplied. Foreign capital arrived in such quantities that it threatened to inflate the currency, drive property beyond reach, and turn every useful discovery into another instrument of speculation.

However, Mirae harnessed the chaos. A sovereign fund absorbed foreign inflows. Strategic industries were barred from uncontrolled purchase. Housing speculation was crushed through strict state backed controls before it could consume the benefits of higher wages. New credit was directed toward production, infrastructure, food, energy, and defense rather than the endless exchange of existing land at ever-higher prices.

The Republic experienced its gold rush while Mirae prepared it for war. The youngest president in the history of the Republic of Korea used a portion of the new wealth to cultivate disorder abroad. She did not create the hatreds of other nations, no individual possessed that power, but she fanned the flames. Fanned the flames of the grievances that already existed: old borders, wounded pride, religious fury, territorial ambition, fear of encirclement, and leaders who mistook escalation for strength.

She merely supplied money where it would cause the most damage, released truths where they would provoke the greatest anger, and placed carefully constructed lies beside them.

A war ignited in the Middle East, an invasion consumed Europe, China was goaded into attacking the territory it called a rebellious province, and finally, the United States of America was forced to attempt to put out all of these fires.

Like this, the great powers turned upon one another. Ships burned. Markets convulsed. Armies consumed ammunition, fuel, money, and men. Governments that might otherwise have paid greater attention to the transformation of the Korean Peninsula became occupied with their own survival.

The Republic, insulated by its new energy, its new industries, and its carefully accumulated reserves, watched the world exhaust itself. Then it turned its attention north.

The peninsula had been divided long enough.