When the price isn't optimal, which it never really is, it's not an equal exchange of value. The typical tautology toted that if you spend X then it's worth X i

When the price isn't optimal, which it never really is, it's not an equal exchange of value. The typical tautology toted that if you spend X then it's worth X is just willfully missing the point that there's such thing as a bad deal. When you build bad deals into a system such that some group of people only has bad deals as options, you are able to extract wealth from them. That's what life is for many people -- a series of bad deals with no other options.