Even the cartels understood this lol. This is why a lot of poor communities support them despite their deranged evilness. At the end of the day, no matter how just and moral your cause is, humans have to eat. If your cause is too high and mighty to feed others, then you can’t complain when they choose the other options
Apparently this was a factor in the Muslim conquest in the 6th and 7th centuries. The Muslims would invade, take all your stuff, tell you what they expected in taxes next year, and then leave you alone. And if you converted you’d get all the perks of being Muslims. For many of the areas they invaded this was a better deal than they were getting from their local rulers so people put up with it and the conquest went relatively smoothly for a conquest, exploding from Arabia all the way to Spain and a good ways out east in like two centuries. You can be the bad guys as long as you’re not the worst guys.
