“Your argument seems to suggest Transactions should pay for the storage of that block in all nodes, and somehow pay node operators for that storage.” The original Bitcoin design had an original Bitcoin node; which performed the storage and mining activity in one. Due to historical reason the mining activity got separated from the original Bitcoin node and now the Bitcoin system has an unstable and not sustainable status quo in which the nowadays mining operators (probably in proxy with popular big mining pools) will reunite the storage activity on their nodes, making the network centralized and thus taking the control of it.