> It normally refers to people extracting money for things far beyond their actual value. That's not what "rent-seeking" means at all. Rent-seeking is extract

> It normally refers to people extracting money for things far beyond their actual value. That's not what "rent-seeking" means at all. Rent-seeking is extracting wealth from a system without creating anything. It's a term meant to differentiate profiting via productivity/adding value (eg. manufacturing a better product and outcompeting others) and profiting via extracting value from others without adding anything (eg. buying out all of the manufacturers of a product and leveraging your monopoly position to jack up prices). Amazon haven't created any value here - they own enough of a stock of a scarce, in-demand resource that they can charge a great deal for it. It's the definition of rent-seeking.