Questions about A Christmas Prince 2: A barely coherent rant

Here's the context for what you're about to read. When The Christmas Prince 2 came out on Netflix in 2018, I was in the throes of studying for my December exams. After I watched it during a study break, my feverish mind kept jumping off of my macroeconomics textbook to focus on the important questions: the logical issues with the world of The Christmas Prince.  I opened up Blogger, made a post entitled "Questions about A Christmas Prince 2", and threw all of my thoughts onto the page stream-of-conscious style. This rant periodically pops into my head once or twice a year, and it always makes me laugh to read it back over, so I thought it would be worth putting it out into the world. I make no promises about the accuracy of my statements about how the economy works, because after another two years of study I've concluded I still know nothing about the field. But anyway, hope you get some laughter out of it.

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How has her father never been to Aldovia before now?

Why does Emily's play get shut down? Surely they have a backup generator for power, and besides that all they need is permission from the people who own the building to use it. The workers don't own the building, do they? Anyway, why are the school workers striking? Surely most of their wages are fixed by contracts and they get to teach rich kids so their work is not really impacted?

Why is the strike so sudden? Usually there's a lot more negotiation before they jump into striking, and something that the workers actually are holding out for. Rebelling against a fiscal policy action as a whole doesn't make much sense.

I can't believe they talked to some random striker and he was the key to everything. What are the odds that he would have exactly the information they needed to figure out what's going on? And how come no one else thought to check up on this at all, besides the one guy who didn't really do it?

I'm not even going to talk about the absolute stupidity that is the idea that one person can have stolen enough money from the economy to single-handedly cause a recession. Or the idea that they could do that and not be noticed.

Why is the economy in such bad shape after just a year? Four financial quarters is not nearly enough time for all the king's changes to have taken effect. An increase in government spending can actually even result in a short-run recession before the stimulus takes effect (since a decrease in consumption spending necesssary for increased investment can result in decreased production in the short run), so without the theft it could have been that they just needed to wait a while to see the results. Also, giving a huge amount of money + Christmas bonuses out willy-nilly is almost certainly going to result in WAY too sharp a spike in the price level. Inflation will be a nightmare and exports will almost halt. Plus they'll have to swing back down at some point after this fiscal and monetary expansion, and there will be a hard recession.

What sort of communist country is this, anyway, where the king can personally pay everyone's wages? If the bad guy's company really did do the work they were paid for, then why are all the Aldovian workers who didn't do anything entitled to these big payouts? If they did do the work, then why is the government the one paying them? Was the Aldovian government really that close to going bankrupt that they couldn't pay for the work they hired people to do? It seems like either there was some gross financial error in the public works planning or the money was stolen directly from the government coffers, which should have been really easy to check.

On a financial document I saw that they are on the euro. If they're in the EU, why are they so focused on only using domestic producers? The whole point of the EU is to allow for easy trade and strong competition. Is the king going to push for Aldexit next? If all the money weren't going into the pocket of that one guy, I don't know if I'd have even had an issue with them using international companies to do the work. Assuming, of course, that those companies were cheaper and more efficient, which does seem suspect for something like local infrastructure construction.

If they are on the Euro but not in the EU, then they are most likely operating on a fixed exchange rate.

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At this point in my rant, the mention of a fixed exchange rate reminded me of the exam I was actually supposed to be studying for and I switched back to studying.