VCs mandate that every possible avenue of rent seeking be exploited in order to maximize the amount and frequency of transactions. You're not getting hardware funded; the VC will steal your idea and pawn it off on some other party capable of exploiting the potential for your product as a service. Because if you don't, someone else will, and they'll have more money to outcompete your product, because enshittification is how FAANG got to be trillion dollar companies.
A person existing is sufficient to make these people assume they are entitled to something for it.
The phrase rent-seeking is such a funny one to me. Like, if rent-seeking is bad that should apply across the board. I.e. being a landlord, literally seeking rent from tenants.
Yet I fear the issue most people on here have with “rent seeking” is the harm it does to a theoretical idea of free market capitalism - rather than the tangible harm of extracting wealth from someone’s need for a place to live.
“Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment without creating new wealth”
So, renting out a home. Just the manipulation of social and political environment has already been done. Rent sought, not rent seeking.
Rent as in rent paid to live in a home fits the definition of “economic rent” perfectly. Because housing rent is an example of economic rent. The cognitive dissonance i am pointing out is that seeking economic rent is bad, but using already created structures to obtain economic rent is… not bad somehow?
>So, renting out a home. Just the manipulation of social and political environment has already been done. Rent sought, not rent seeking.
That makes sense for the land, but not so much for the actual structure that sits on top. The land is going to exist no matter what. the same can't be said of the apartment building .
That’s the “without creating new wealth” part of the definition of rent seeking. Now, I’ve lived in a lot of rentals in my life - and not one of my landlords built the home they were renting out. Most or all of those homes had the cost of building them paid off decades ago.
And not all renting out is rent seeking! On occasion in cities with decreasing home prices, the landlord is subsidising the tenant. That is rare though!
Agreed - there are rare circumstances when landlords are losing money. When that happens landlords will usually seek rent increases, or changes to housing / zoning / development rules, etc.
There’s a reason people in parts of the US are gravely concerned about the rapid acquisition of housing by PE groups and other large investors. Which, not coincidentally has led to the enshittification of the mobile home park market. Something I wouldn’t have believed possible a decade ago, but her we are.
You’re so close! This is like watching right wing people smugly saying “the phrase women’s rights is such a funny one to me - if we assume women are humans and deserve rights then what next, black rights?” As if they’ve hit a winning argument that of course black people aren’t human and don’t deserve rights so of course women's rights are a nonsense as well.
You've started with the assumption that landlording is a good Capitalist respectable thing and nobody could question it, so mocking the thing a landlord does can't possibly have any legs to stand on. But yes! A landlord seeking rent for doing nothing is a parasite! Yes! It’s rent seeking! The people who really try to defend it as difficult and performing a useful service are bad people who benefit from the status quo and lack the imagination and wider experience to see that things like council housing exists and works and benefits people other than the wealthy landowners. If there are two houses and two families could own them and live in them, turning it into one family owning both plots/houses and the the other family paying rent forever is worse. Turning it into one landlord owning both plots/houses and charging both families to live there forever so they don't have to work for a living is worse again. Turning it into a landlord class who both try to squeeze as much rent as possible while lobbying the authorities to block new-house building and reduce tenant's rights is worse again.
A person existing is sufficient to make these people assume they are entitled to something for it.