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Message: <blockquote data-quote="werecorpse" data-source="post: 8181597" data-attributes="member: 55491">Same as always, the personal profit and the greed of the ones making the decisions. Profit isn‘t about the fact that a resource is plentiful or rare its about getting it for less that you sell it for. How much less? That’s the billion credit question.The question isn’t why have conflict over plentiful resources it’s can a profit be made by getting the resources via a conflict from someone else rather than via no conflict to gather them themselves?Say a CEO  gets a 2% annual bonus if they can get their hands on a trillion already mined and smelted kilos of X resource by pillaging a couple of semi abandoned but culturally sensitive space cities for an estimated pillaging cost of between $4.50 and $5 a kilo rather than the $5.10 a kilo it currently costs to mine it, and all they have to do is work out a way to send a couple of dozen warships into the system along with their haulage vehicles. I mean the warship actual costs arent paid for by the company so the only cost to the company is the bribes to the local military leaders/politicians. Easy money baby.So the space company pays $100 million in setting up a false flag attack by those pesky people in the other empire, and some bribes to some admirals or more likely politicians. Then it makes say $100 billion in extra profit and more importantly to the decision maker the CEO gets an extra $2 billion in bonus (and self justifies it and to the board by saying they made the company more profitable for the shareholders, who tut tut about the violence while buying a new grav sled with their dividends)And of course history suggests that for some there is no amount that answers the  question “How much is enough?”.Its not that we don’t have enough resources for everyone to live peacefully and well it’s that there is no profit in it.Plus there might be a space military industrial complex with groups of rich individuals at the top who only sustain their wealth position if their company keeps making money.</blockquote>

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