Who gets the money?

[Egon Bigmemes]

Personally I always thought that Liberty's demand for 1.5b in base registrations is excessive, hence why I have not personally built any bases there... at least legally. It is however their right to set those prices, and they will have had their reasons for setting it so high - again, I cannot attest to internals of Libgovt, not being a part of it, but I can say that there are a number of reasons to do so: to lighten the load on law enforcements, or to make it easier/harder to siege new bases, to discourage/encourage people to build bases, yada yada yada.

you basically said it yourself. it's damn near impossible to siege legal bases in Liberty, and you have a fleet you can batphone if it happens. not only that, liberty is a high volume traffic area (or at least was lol) which, if you advertise your base that might manufacture or sell something, will make back that 1.5 billion incredibly fast

real estate is expensive in real life, and when Liberty is the most active house, it has the most expensive real estate

alternatively, just build a base on the border systems