Part 29: The player's role redux and 'subsidies'

Not so much. Since I view the role of the player in a 4x as an abstraction of both public and private forces, and since the Liberals are the party most focused on responding to civilian market demand for economic improvement in the game, the allocation of resources to labor mixes and objectives not responding to those economic incentives is, I presume, caused by public appropriation of funds and allocation of those funds towards public goals. So, for instance, the current heavy focus on colonisation and the development of shipbuilding technology is presumed to be because there are tax revenues being dropped on the aerospace sector to ensure they make breakthroughs first and dominate the output of heavy industry, rather than seeing capital respond to the current increasing price of food in a larger way.

Spending piles of money to hurry things may just be piles of investment capital following good returns- and given that the United Republic is a largely free economy, that is much of what spending piles of money is being interpreted as.