It can occur with bureaucrats assaulting economics. Rather than gobbling up someone else’s resources, some governments choose to gobble up their own from an adjacent sector. The Tang Dynasty followed such a perpendicular course. Rather than expanding the empire physically to source more silver, they instead expanded the list of metals that “backed” their currency to include copper. The Tang’s adoption of copper as currency succeeded at stabilizing the financial system, but at the cost of causing empire-wide metals shortages that enervated . . . everything else.
