> There's a reason "rents" are called "rents"; land rent is the most classic example of them. The "owner" of a piece of land does nothing to produce its value, they just take money for nothing because they hold a scarce resource.
Rent seeking is a clearly defined economic concept that is not related to the seperate concept of renting an asset to somebody.
> Rent seeking is an economic concept that occurs when an entity seeks to gain wealth without any reciprocal contribution of productivity. An example of rent seeking is when a company lobbies the government for grants, subsidies, or tariff protection.
> Renting an asset to somebody has a very obvious reciprocal consideration of value.
You could make the same argument for any of the classic examples of economic rents. A doctor's license or a taxi medallion is obviously economically valuable; that doesn't make it not a rent. The thing that makes it a rent is when you're able to rent it out for more than it cost you to produce, or when you don't produce it at all.
You’ve linked to a Wikipedia page that describes dozens of different definitions for what rent is. The category of rent that this thread is broadly discussing is rent in the form of value extracted from capital and land. The much broader term “economic rent” includes things like wage increases negotiated by labor unions, which I presume you’re not objecting to, and certainly isn’t the topic of this thread.
Rent seeking describes a specific case of “economic rent” where the reciprocal value either doesn’t exist or is highly contrived. As I’ve said, it’s fine to be against a persons right to seek “economic rent” from their capital or land. But this isn’t an “anti-rent-seeking” position. That’s an economically Marxist anti-capitalist position, as that is the most fundamental component of Marx’s economic model.
There's a huge difference between saying that people shouldn't be able to rent out capital they've legitimately earned (by creating value through their own efforts), and saying people shouldn't be able to seek rent from things they didn't create but just squatted on - radio spectrum, land, IP addresses, fraudulent patents...
>The "owner" of a piece of land does nothing to produce its value, they just take money for nothing because they hold a scarce resource
As soon as anybody owns any piece of land or capital, they are not doing anything to produce any value that is derived from it, they are simply collecting money for controlling a scarce resource. Those two factors of production can create ongoing value without any intervention from their owners, and you either support a persons right to own those resources, and collect some portion of the value they create, or you don't.
Your use of the phrase "legitimately earned" also means nothing in this context, and I presume this is just a weasel word you're using to avoid actually having to clarify any sort of concrete stance. For starters, legitimate according to who? I would further presume that you have some sort of view on who's accumulated their wealth legitimately, and who hasn't. What criteria have you invented for this? Is the use of capital and land something you would consider contributes to "illegitimate earnings"? Because all of that just circles back to "seizing the means of production" (as in land and capital).
Also, what's wrong with unearned capital? If I give somebody a hammer, do you have some sort of moral objection to them deriving income from the increased productivity that would create for them? Because I would suggest that the only thing that matters there is whether I had a legitimate ownership claim to the hammer in the first place.
> That's a big revision from your previous comment
It's not, but semantic arguments are pointless. If you want to use "rent seeking" to mean something different from what it normally means, fine, I don't mind using different words.
> As soon as anybody owns any piece of land or capital, they are not doing anything to produce any value that is derived from it, they are simply collecting money for controlling a scarce resource. Those two factors of production can create ongoing value without any intervention from their owners, and you either support a persons right to own those resources, and collect some portion of the value they create, or you don't.
> Also, what's wrong with unearned capital? If I give somebody a hammer, do you have some sort of moral objection to them deriving income from the increased productivity that would create for them? Because I would suggest that the only thing that matters there is whether I had a legitimate ownership claim to the hammer in the first place.
Right; the point is that land and capital are very different. People can legitimately own hammers, which are the work of human hands (yes, access to the means of production could be a factor, but if we assume that production of hammers is now widespread then it's irrelevant). Claims of ownership of land (or radio spectrum, or so on), if you mean chattel ownership, can't ever be legitimate, because people can't make land, only seize it.
> People can legitimately own hammers, which are the work of human hands
> Claims of ownership of land (or radio spectrum, or so on), if you mean chattel ownership, can't ever be legitimate, because people can't make land, only seize it.
These two claims aren't logically consistent. As a factor of production, land includes all natural resources. 100% of the input materials used for the production of a hammer are land, and so are 100% of the input materials used for the entire hammer supply chain. If you claim that ownership of land is never legitimate, then how can ownership of a hammer ever be legitimate if it's made of 100% land? Nobody made the iron or the wood in the hammer with their own hands.
I can see that you prefer to invent your own vocabulary, rather than use the long established vocabulary of economics. But that doesn't make the inconsistencies in your arguments dissapear. The only thing you've consistently expressed that a person can have a legitimate ownership claim over is labor (which yet again, takes us back to seizing the means of production).
> As a factor of production, land includes all natural resources. 100% of the input materials used for the production of a hammer are land, and so are 100% of the input materials used for the entire hammer supply chain. If you claim that ownership of land is never legitimate, then how can ownership of a hammer ever be legitimate if it's made of 100% land? Nobody made the iron or the wood in the hammer with their own hands.
No, but the overwhelming majority of the value of the hammer is from human efforts, not from the raw materials. Like yes technically you could say that whoever takes the hammer should have to pay tax on the value of 100g of unrefined iron or whatever, and if we ever reach a point where good iron for the tools that you need for good jobs is so expensive that only the children of rich families are able to hope to own those tools and the rest of us have to rent them at extortionate rates then maybe that would be a policy worth adopting. In theory nothing is 100% land and nothing is 100% product. But in practice you can draw the distinction pretty easily and say which things are scarce enough that taking them out of circulation has an impact on your fellow citizens and which aren't.
Rent seeking is a clearly defined economic concept that is not related to the seperate concept of renting an asset to somebody.
> Rent seeking is an economic concept that occurs when an entity seeks to gain wealth without any reciprocal contribution of productivity. An example of rent seeking is when a company lobbies the government for grants, subsidies, or tariff protection.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/rentseeking.asp
Renting an asset to somebody has a very obvious reciprocal consideration of value.