Benefits everyone? The guilds that use venoms would have benefited without the price fixing. In fact, they would heve benefited more since venoms would be even more widely available since all would be legal. Why not just legalize everything without the price restriction? Then the snakes will benefit from additional venoms to sell, as would shop owners and venom consumers.

In this model, only the snakes benefit on the selling side when in the above model all sellers benefit. Clearly this is a move based solely on snake greed with the "legalize everything" clause thrown in to make the venom-desperate knights accept it.

And no, making the snakes filthy rich by stealing sales from everyone else does not make everyone benefit. I thought that trickle-down economics was a disaster when implemented by a president of one of the ancient great nation in some time before the Seleucarian Empire. (My history is a bit foggy on the details, though.)

And saying that this is good because it gives the snakes an edge over non-snake merchants is pointless. They already had it. In case you failed elementary arithmetic, merchants have to sell venoms ABOVE what the snake distributers sell them at in order to make profit. Thus the snake guilds always had an advantage over other shop keepers.

--Saruman, the White.

Penned by my hand on the 8th of Glacian, in the year 267 AF.