We might be talking at cross purposes, since I'm not suggesting the establishment should generate income passively. I'm responding to the idea that the Maestro is somehow outside the Barter system and never gets any Barter from Maestro-ing. Hence the problem with Make Them Buy- if the Maestro doesn't ever have any Barter she can't ever be made to buy, even though lots of resources fictionally flow through her hands. (Yes, it's possible to not be a distributor of resources if your staff are all volunteers who provide their own equipment and do their own maintenance, but that's not exactly the general case, you know?)

The full extent of my view is: the establishment and the Maestro are self-sufficient in the general run of things. If for some reason the Maestro wants extra mechanical Barter in order to interface with the various game mechanics that reference Barter, she should tell the group about the awesome events she is running to generate it, thus enriching the story. If she wants wealth to be a big ongoing aspect of her character, she should take Fingers.

Daniel, you're arguing for not playing with Barter at all, or minimizing your use of it. Which I think is a perfectly sensible way to play and also how my instincts go. But it's going to come out weird if everybody but the Maestro is using the Barter system fully.

Hm. Maybe the people of Urbandale don't respect the Wicker-Wise's right to sacrifice, and I agree with you that that's good drama. but somebody must, right? She's presumably from a People who do sacrifice, which is where she learned it was a good thing. So when I say "most people" I mean "most of your People." Maybe your people have even forgotten but the old gods still want their sacrifice and will start wrecking things if they don't get it? That's still somebody who believes in your Right. Or maybe the people believe deep down that you have a Right, but the New Nobility have convinced them to ignore it.

I guess you can take a Right that nobody in the world respects, but I'm not sure why you want to. You're free to rage and stamp and call down the wrath of your gods on your faithless anyway. If you invented the right to kill people out of  whole cloth and neither people nor gods respect it, you're basically just a serial killer, right? I'm not sure I think serial killer Wicker-Wise actually does have a Right.

I have a hard time seeing "You have a Right to X" as different from "Most people agree that you have a Right to X". After all, it's not like the right is an objectively extant thing you can put on your shelf and point to; it functions only if people respect it.

So if you have a Right to the hospitality of hearth and hall, you can go up to a hall and ask for lodgings, and people will generally recognize that they ought to take you in. They still might not, but you, they, and anyone watching know they're not doing what they ought.
If  you have no such Right, you can still ask. And it's not like you're guaranteed to fail. The people you're imposing on know that they're under no obligation to help you, but maybe they like your face, or you Win Them Over, or they recognize from your colors that you and they serve the same king.

What the Right provides is a social context in which the default is to give you the thing you have a right to, without further justification. It neither enables your actions nor forbids other people's, it just fills in a piece of the local social contract.

The fact that you can hold Rights violations against other PCs or the MC is a totally different thing though. That's extremely direct meta communication and in any group I play with I would expect the right-violating player to back down immediately.