The Han court's argument over state monopolies on salt and iron, mentioned briefly elsewhere in this collection, survives in an actual transcribed record, the Yan Tie Lun, "Discourses on Salt and Iron," compiled by Huan Kuan around 81 BCE, making it one of the few classical Chinese policy debates historians can examine in something like its own words.
The debate was convened by the young Emperor Zhao's regents to reconsider the salt and iron monopolies established under Emperor Wu to fund military campaigns, and it pitted Confucian scholars, arguing from the yi-over-li position developed in Mencius, against imperial ministers defending the monopolies as fiscally necessary. The Confucians argued that state profit-seeking corrupted government by putting rulers in the position of merchants competing with their own people, that it burdened households with inflated prices, and that a virtuous ruler would have no need of such revenue, a direct application of Mencius's reply to King Hui. The ministers countered that the monopolies funded frontier defense against the Xiongnu and that appeals to virtue could not substitute for concrete fiscal resources.
The debate did not end in full victory for either side: the salt monopoly was retained while other measures were adjusted, an outcome consistent with the pattern by which Chinese imperial governance blended Confucian rhetoric with continued Legalist administrative machinery regardless of who won a given argument, and the Yan Tie Lun became a durable reference point cited whenever the tension between fiscal necessity and Confucian moral economy resurfaced, which was often.