Well, if you go down the route of "where the money is coming from" you arrive at the central bank that creates that money out of thin air. That's why it's fundamental to understand that wealth can only be created by labour. It can then be distributed according to any system imaginable, but it is always created by labour. Wealth as in real physical goods and services, not as in the number in your account.

I'm not saying that all labour creates wealth. That's something else and I don't believe it. Trench warfare is the most laborious thing imaginable and it certainly creates no wealth.

> I didn't argue "workers receive their wages as a gift or some kind of welfare."

You absolutely did not, but I sensed that angle. The difference is that a worker will never receive any wages in exchange of not doing anything, while a landlord will always receive his wages for not doing anything. "How their own lives are funded" are through their labour when it comes to the worker and through the worker's labour when it comes to the landlord.

You are really just trying to get to rent-seeking behavior provides little value. My argument is that a lot of tech companies are providing rent-seeking behavior at a huge scale - and if you work for one of those companies in which you are deriving your income from that very behavior - how can you be so high and mighty about a small time landlord deriving small money from rent-seeking behavior except for, when of course, it hurts your own pocket.

"Small money" is relative. Rent is the largest expense for most workers.

Most tech companies operate on a free market where nobody is forced to pay them if they don't want to. Nobody is strictly dependent on their services, while we are all dependent on having shelter. And painting with a broad stroke you can't say that tech companies are rent-seeking, information technology is highly beneficial for the economy at large, in practical ways that are too numerous to list.

It's not one small-time landlord, it is millions of small time landlords. Just like one small time police officer demanding protection money from local businesses is not a problem for the economy of a nation, but millions of police officers doing that is.

You could say that people can go somewhere else if they don't like it. Don't hate the player, hate the game. And that is true, I think a lot of people will go somewhere else and are already doing that.

With that said, I've never worked for a company engaging in rent-seeking and never done that myself, tech or other industry, so in that aspect I'm completely clean even though I'm a sinner like all of us.