> You said have to.

It's a fact that they do. If they didn't have to then why would they leave the money on the table?

> Now you say most and demand that others prove the contrary.

It's most because if most of the developers in silicon valley moved to other places then the cost of living there would fall to parity with the other places as a result of decreased scarcity of housing and other resources, before all of them did. And because not everyone has the same utility function -- some people have to live there more than other people, e.g. because their spouse also works there and they can't find two equally-paying jobs in the same other city at the same time.

> Please stick to your original claim and prove it yourself. That's how honest discussion is done.

"People behave rationally" is a basic assumption. It isn't always true, but if you're going to contend that it isn't in a particular case then you're the one who needs to show that.

> The real question here is not whether developers can get the exact same salary working somewhere other than SF/SV. For one thing, the story wasn't just about our industry.

You're changing the subject. The story, and the protests, refer to "highly paid" tech workers at SV companies like Google and Apple. But it remains true that those people are not significantly wealthier on a PPP basis than people making median US wages but living in a city with a lower cost of living.

> Even among tech companies, subject to the exact same cost-of-living issues, there are significant differences in pay scales.

Better developers obviously get paid more than worse developers. But the same is true in Texas. They both get paid less and pay less for housing but the better developer still makes more than the worse developer. And that isn't new either -- "better talent costs more" is as old as money.

> That enables them to compound their original advantage, in a feedback loop that IMO must be attenuated unless we want to live in a true monoculture.

There are two kinds of markets. One is natural monopolies, like local roads or last mile telecommunications, where the fixed cost is the essentially whole cost, barriers to entry are high, monopoly is inevitable, and they should be operated by the local government. The other is "real" markets that, left alone, would have competition.

We keep screwing up the second ones and forcing them into monopolies anyway, by making it harder for small entities to compete. The situation with software patents is a prime example.

Having money to pay talent is an advantage, but it isn't an insurmountable advantage. The only way to use it to stay on top is to be efficient. Serve every possible niche so well that nobody else can come in and carve one out for themselves. And if a company is doing that, nobody objects.

The problem isn't that, it's that we've set things up so that little companies have prohibitively high costs, so a startup that should be five people in a garage using money borrowed from parents instead has to take a million dollars in VC funding to hire lawyers and file paperwork. And then, if they succeed, megacorp shows up with a buyout against the threat of a lawsuit if you refuse to take the money to make the competition go away, which is what the VCs wanted all along anyway, so everybody gets paid but nobody competes.

The problem isn't that they have too much money, it's that they have too much leverage. If was only the money and regulatory barriers to entry were lower then there would be too many startups to buy them all and more of them would become independent competitors.