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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8817542" data-attributes="member: 42582">The way a real-world trade hub works is that traders from many placers bring their goods their and exchange them for mutual benefit. And then the hub charges transaction taxes, and/or service fees (eg for accommodation, for access to market places, etc), and the income from those taxes and fees supports life in the hub.From the traders' point of view, they are losing some of their "in principle" profit, but that is the cost of dealing with an intermediary. (I mean, traders are themselves intermediaries between producers and consumers.)I haven't read the Radiant Citadel book, but if the place is described as a trade hub, presumably it is working on more-or-less the model I've just described. Goods come in, goods go out, and the Citadel pays for itself out of the money earned by acting as an intermediary.There are practical difficulties with levying a progressive tariff - for instance, traders have incentives to split their activities into smaller components to reduce their overall tax burden. On the other hand, that sort of disaggregation itself generates costs, and so if the progressive rates are set with those disaggregation costs in mind, and there are some other regulatory efforts made to monitor fraudulent transaction-splitting, we can imagine it working.Nothing I've read about the Radiant Citadel makes it seem any more economically absurd than The Shire, which is one of the most beloved of fantasy settings.</blockquote>

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