Superpowers, Diamonds, and Economics

[Originally posted at Slacktivist (page 6).]

Years ago, maybe as far back as when I was in high school, some friends and I tried to work out what the planeteers were doing these days. We came up with all sorts of things one could do with their powers, good, evil and otherwise.

The one that sticks with me is something we came up with for earth. We started off thinking of as something one could use for strip mining because at the time we were imagining what would happen if they'd turned their backs on everything they ever believed in. Then, when one of us realized that he could probably use his power to pull diamonds right out of the ground we decided on something that was at once more hopeful and more vindictive.

He'd be using it get diamonds, lots and lots of diamonds, in an effort to collapse the market so that they could no longer be used to fund ... well pretty much everything they're currently used to fund. The aim would be to destroy the diamond trade via oversupply. Diamonds for everyone.

Perhaps not the most well thought out plan ever*, but it's stuck with me. (Unlike the things we came up with for the other powers which I remember not a bit.)

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*For example, I don't remember us figuring out what the people currently underpaid in the diamond industry would do when the industry stopped paying entirely. As near as I can tell the thinking was limited to, "Diamonds are used to pay for evil, so devalue diamonds."