[Spaceships] Making a setting work...

[Ejidoth]

I'm struggling slightly over how to really enforce serious debt in the setting where law enforcement is lax enough to let piracy be a major profession too.

That is... if you try not to pay up on a debt, law enforcement wants to catch you. If you pirate, law enforcement wants to catch you. Piracy includes stealing ships, so the monetary value of both crimes are similar in this case, so both are roughly equal priority.

So.

If I have a setting where pirates tend to be able to often escape punishment, how do I enforce debt? It seems like the end result is that companies won't give out big loans like that to free traders.