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"At any rate, we were born during Discord's reign. After we overthrew him (and finished scraping the caramel off the palace), the ponies of Equestria began to return to that three-way system. It took barely a year for its flaws to start to surface.

"My sister and I went into deep discussion over the matter. We consulted with every sage we knew of every race; dragons, griffins, the buffalo, the zebra-- we even used the Window of Dimension to peer into other realms and speak with creatures of other times and planes of existence. Von Mises, Hayek, Bastiat, Sowell...(3)

"After much consideration, we took the necessary step..." Her eyes twinkled. "Can you guess what it was?"

"Um, you took the throne and forced everypony to play nice?" Market Forces hazarded.

"Well, we did do that," Celestia admitted. "But--"

"No wait," Market said, coming to a halt so suddenly he sat on the marble floor. He tapped his hoof as the thought gelled, a smile spreading on his face. "Oh, brilliant-- you took the Sun and Moon out of the equation."

Celestia nodded, pleased. "Exactly! We could have taken control of the weather, or even of agriculture and the production of food-- but either of those is too complicated an issue for any one pony to handle wisely or efficiently. Besides, I was loth to put on a harness and pull a plow." She made a face, eliciting a chuckle from her economist. "But the Sun and Moon; they were perfect. By their natures, they could not be biased, could not be used to show favoritism to one group over another, could not be used divisively, or at least not without terrible difficulty.  Their light was a utility that had to be, by their natures, distributed with perfect impartiality to all ponies, great and small, and nopony could prosper from it at another's detriment."

"But more importantly," Market Forces said, interrupting in his eagerness, "was what it did to the unicorns. It put them out of a job." He got back to his feet and trotted alongside the princess.

"I think you have the gist of it," Celestia said. "But continue."

"I can imagine what it was like," he said. "One morning all the unicorns wake up and discover that the Sun and Moon are no longer in their control--"

"You should have seen the look on Princess Platinum the Fourteenth's face," Celestia smirked. "Ah, I wish I'd had a camera back then. Or a portrait artist; she held that pose for nearly half an hour."  The ever-dignified Sun Princess reared her head back, bugging her eyes out and dropping her chin dramatically.

http://www.fimfiction.net/story/68222/11/nyxs-family/chapter-11

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