Intellectual property doesn't come for free. It takes a huge amount of money and risks to develop new drugs. Even holding on to assets like houses involve risks because they might be swept away in a once in a century flood. Digital platform didn't exist even a generation ago. Some pretty smart people conceived the idea, put in the requisite work to produce something billions of people like to use and they got unfathomably wealthy. All of us would have been poorer for it if we didn't allow innovative people to profit from the hard work for a substantial amount of time. If you remove these incentives the result is technological and societal stagnation. Professor Christophers profits every time a person buys a copy of his book for the rest of his life. Isn't this a rent? If he were to be paid only a lump sum by the publisher and were disallowed to profit from the actual sales volume of the book would he have written the book?

Excellent discussion.

The "professions" are themselves rentier industries, with powerful highly connected "gatekeepers" preserving the monopoly of their charters etc.