But the point is that a record (or anything else for that matter) is worth whatever someone is willing to pay.
If I want a record I will pay whatever I can afford to pay to get it. And if by doing so i f*ck it up for someone else, tough sh!t. Nothing wrong with that. Just because I can and do, does that mean I'm somehow less of a collector than anyone else?
I've been buying records seriously since 1978 (admittedly back then I couldn't afford hardly anything). And now, due to my good luck that some of the stuff I got 2, 3, 4 copies of (through hard work digging in the US for many years) are worth many, many times what I paid for them I can buy stuff I only ever dreamed of.
Does that make me some kind of record collecting criminal ?