For a non-economics-education friend (I am asking for a friend cliche

) can you exmplain it like you are talking to a toddler? What is exactly artificial price subsidy? And why is that bad? I am asking because I really don't know what it means

I'm upset because their Economic central planing is significantly altering the way Bitcoin works.
They built Segwit with a 75% fee discount compared to normal Bitcoin transactions..
That doesn't make Bitcoin transactions as a whole any cheaper, it just gives segwit transactions an unfair advantage over normal Bitcoin transactions for no reason other than that they decided to.
Segwit makes it so there are two areas to store data in the blockchain.
The traditional area, and the new segwit area.
If there is to be such a thing as segwit in Bitcoin, the free market should be what determines the price of space in that area of the blocks.
It should also determine how much block space is produced as well as it had always done up until the time the blocks became full.
Instead of letting market forces choose, the Segwit group have decreed that Segwit data must cost 75% less than conventional Bitcoin transaction data.
Some actual estimates for what people must pay for room in the traditional block space:
Segwit says that by decree data stored in the Segwit portion of the block must cost 75% less per byte than data stored in the original portion of the block. This is an arbitrary number, and virtually guaranteed to be wrong since it is different than what miners and tx makers would agree to on their own. It also significantly changes the economic code of Bitcoin since now tx creators must bid against each other for two different types of block space compared to the one we had previously.
We already knew that Bitcoin's economic code was working amazingly well due to it's amazing growth in the first 7.5 years of its history.
The same devs behind segwit decided to change that economic code by intentionally letting the blocks become full.
Here was the result:
The Core devs are busy engaging in all sorts of changes to the economic code of Bitcoin without understanding what they are doing.
My favorite economist summed up the situation very well.
“It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a ‘dismal science.’ But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.”
― Murray N. Rothbard
The devs behind Segwit and the full block policy are totally irresponsible