"I wasn't talking nonsense."
Shen Tang brushed Qi Shan's hand aside.
A hint of surprise showed on her face.
She said, "You can tell at a glance that Yuan Liang isn't cut out to be a heartless profiteer! Real estate is a giant sickle for harvesting leeks! If you haven't been harvested by it, you can't call yourself a genuine leek! We spend money hiring commoners to build houses, then sell the houses to them and earn back the money in their hands. Then we use that money to hire them to keep working..."
Qi Shan: "..."
He'd only half-understood the first few sentences.
He'd managed to guess their general meaning.
The later sentences were much easier to understand.
At first, it didn't seem like there was anything wrong with the plan.
However, the wages they paid the commoners were only enough to cover basic necessities, leaving them with just a little spare money.
The plan his lord had in mind simply wouldn't work.
Unless they paid the commoners higher wages.
For one thing, that wasn't realistic; they didn't have that much money or grain. For another, the value of labor was limited. Pay more than the work itself was worth, and the commoners would grow lazy, stop working and give up farming. That would damage other industries and bring endless trouble in its wake.
Qi Shan raised his objections.
He hoped to stamp out his lord's unrealistic idea.
Shen Tang said, "Of course I know about those problems."
The commoners had little money, and what they earned wasn't enough—at least not enough to renovate or build new houses. But they could offer low-interest loans. Just like when they'd offered low-interest mortgages to merchants and commoners, encouraging them to go elsewhere to buy New Year goods and bring them back