The Discourses on Salt and Iron was a debate held at the imperial court in the early days of the Unknown The God-King of Mbo, in need of funds for his numerous wars, was considering reversing the collection of mostly laissez-faire economic policies established by the previous kings and the established priesthood of his conquered territories, and imposing a wide variety of state interventions, such as creating state monopolies on Mbo's salt and iron enterprises, price stabilization schemes, and taxes on capital. In order to evaluate the wisdom of these policies, the God-King held a conclave of the premier lector-priests of the day to examine them. The conclave resulted in a month of fierce debate.
The debate was characterized by two opposing factions, the reformists and the modernists. The reformists were largely the more conservative elements of the priesthood, who supported standardization and unification of laws and economic regulations across the new empire but opposed the radical new policies and mostly supported the current economic system. The modernists supported radical changes: government monopolies on salt and iron, state price stabilization schemes, and expansion of government expenditures and the establishment of a central bureaucracy to manage all of the above, outside of the priesthood and only subservient to the God-King himself. The Modernists also supported anti-mercantile policies to funnel the profits of private merchants into state coffers to fund the government's military and colonization campaigns in the south and east.
The Modernists effectively won the debates, and the God-King made a series of profound economic changes to the economic and political foundation of Great Mbo that had profound and long-reaching consequences. It severely weakened the power of the established priesthood and established the Unknown as a rival organization. It curtailed the burgeoning merchant class, which had begun to grow powerful through their role in enabling the Wars of Unification, and reduced their social status to the lowest tier of Imperial Society. It secured great revenue for the Imperial Government, and funded the unification of the continent, but also discouraged free enterprise and limited trade across the Empire, locking the imperial economy and, to some extent, its scientific growth into relative stasis.