I think you missed my point. "Back in the day" SRI and NSI handed out address space in any size chunk you could imagine asking for. How much of this isn't used (My guess: atleast %60 is unused). How many of these companies do not exist anymore? If you charged $1 for any allocation that wasn't being announced (the quickest way to figure out if its being used), then any block that wasn't paid for could easily be reassigned. Unless we want to go IPv6, the only solution to running out of address space is to get the space back that is assigned to non-existant companies.
As a small data point. Back when I worked for IANA, I managed to reclaim ~20% of the total IPv4 space. There are active discusions in many quarters on how to ensure that the feedback loop is closed and "dead" space is reclaimed for reuse. Of course money is a great driver, but there are reasons to have other tools in the toolbox, otherwise we could just run the Internet on a big DHCP server and be done with it... :) --bill