Economic principles show up in the least likely of places — including, apparently, video games. It goes beyond the supply-and-demand built into Farmville. It turns out that one of the most popular video games in the world, Sim City, is secretly a supply-sider.

“In Sim City, you design your metropolis from scratch, deciding everything from where to build roads and police stations to which neighborhoods should be zoned residential or commercial,” explains Politico magazine. “More than a founder or a mayor, you are practically a municipal god who can shape an urban area with an ease that real mayors can only envy.”

There are rules, of course. As mayor, a player can make any number of changes — but like real life, changes have consequences.

“As the game progresses and your small town bulges into a megalopolis, crime will soar, traffic jams will clog and digital citizens will demand more services from their leaders,” Politico notes. “Those services don’t come free. One of the key decisions in the game is setting the municipal tax rate. There are different rates for residential, commercial and industrial payers, as well as for the poor, middle-class and wealthy.”

And here’s where it gets really interesting. It turns out that tax rates have consequences, too.

“Sim City lets you indulge your wildest fiscal fantasies,” Politico explains. “Banish the IRS and set taxes to zero in Teapartyville, or hike them to 99 percent on the filthy rich in the People’s Republic of Sims. Either way, you will discover that the game’s economic model is based on the famous Laffer Curve, the theoretical darling of conservative politicians and supply-side economists.”

That curve, famously sketched onto a cocktail napkin at a dinner in Washington, D.C., in 1974, shows that raising tax rates doesn’t always mean raising tax revenues.

“At a tax rate of 0 percent, the government would collect no tax revenues, no matter how large the tax base,” Laffer himself explained recently. “Likewise, at a 100 percent tax rate, the government would also collect no revenues because no one would be willing to work for an after-tax wage of zero there would be no tax base. Between these extremes, there are two tax rates that will collect the same amount of revenue: A high tax rate on a small tax base and a low rate on a large tax base.”

People change their behavior in response to tax policies. They can hire smart accountants to find tax shelters, they can move their income or even their domiciles, they can even choose to work less.

It’s a reality that even video game players have learned. There are websites devoted to figuring out that magical tipping point between taxing enough, and taxing too much in Sim City.

Politico adds that it’s an important economic lesson.

“Like many people of my generation, my first experience of economics wasn’t in a textbook or a classroom, or even in the news: it was in a computer game,” one economist told the magazine.

It’s just more proof you can’t escape economics.