An appropriately stiff integalactic tax on entropy, enforced only above some enormous threshold like burning a planet, could be optimal. Because you're right -

An appropriately stiff integalactic tax on entropy, enforced only above some enormous threshold like burning a planet, could be optimal. Because you're right -- at some scale, for some payoff, burning a Venus is the right decision. But ceteris peribus, harvesting from the entropy already present is better than adding to the universe's entropy.