It's an interesting thought. Well, such things have happened, not buying the country but a possession thereof. Off the top of my head, I can remember two examples:
(1) The Lousiana Purchase in 1803, where the US bought it from France after Napoleon had stolen it from Spain three years before.
(2) After the US took the Spanish possessions in the 1898 war, Spain was practically bankrupt and had to sell the Mariana, Palaos, and Carolina islands to Germany.
I won't comment on the War of American Aggression (as we often call it in Spain) ot the Sinking of the Maine Lie. ;-p Please direct your flames elsewhere. (Although the Maine thing makes for an interesting plot.)
In Traveller Terms, however, how is it different from offering favorable conditions for a world to join the 3I? I imagine that in Milieu Zero there would be a lot of that, offering special deals to key worlds, e.g. in the intersection of trade routes. Specially in low population, democratic worlds, offering direct citizen payments in the new currency would be rather cost-effective (and lead to high local inflation later on...). I can easily imagine a couple of scenarios around the in-situ negotiations.
Another thought closer to the examples above would be the 3I buying planets from another interstellar polity. A clever Imperial governor might engineer a trade war bringing a pocket empire to the edge of bankruptcy, then offer a way out by buying a certain planet. In which, coincidentally, Lanthanum deposits will be discovered shortly thereafter. Now, negotiations are still under way, and the PCs are involved in an attempt to uncover the actual motives of the imperials...
Carlos
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Carlos Alós-Ferrer
Chair of Microeconomics, University of Cologne
http://www.decisions.uni-koeln.de
Am 01-Feb-2016 14:30:33 +0100 schrieb xxxxxx@gmail.com:
OK, I was reading history about the USA. It seems we offered Spain a GREAT deal of money to buy Cuba from them but they said no. This got me to wondering why we don't buy other places. Why not just buy a country from its people? I mean go in and say to everyone in Cuba, we will give each person 20,000$ USD and the top people even more, if they agree to become a state of the United states. Why do the war thing? Why not just ask the people? They can vote on it or the top rules can make a choice. I could see this as being a good way to go for a lot of poor lands. Then the USA would grow and people would mostly be happy, much more happy than if we had bombed them or grabbed them like HI. So why is this not done? If it could be done then it seems like in traveller it might be a good way for an empire to acquire new planets. Just seems there must be some reason because I have never heard of it being done in real life.
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