this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2026
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Why do you think they call it “rent seeking”?
I didn't say there wasn't a historical connection to the two
It's more than a historical word origin, it's a description of what it is. "Rent seeking" is the act of trying to extract profit from the mere ownership of a piece of capital without doing any work to produce anything new. Land already exists. Nobody produced it. Someone just came along and got a piece of paper that says that the government can arrest people for trying to use the land within this imaginary boundary without your consent. That's good if it's your house and you're just living there, but once it's been made into a commercial good that can be bought, sold, or rented out, you are now receiving profit from owning land without producing anything. AKA: Rent. And while selling the property for a profit isn't colloquially called rent, it has the same function of extracting excess value without putting in additional work.
I think we're getting into square rectangle debate, my original comment was to highlight that rent seeking isn't just tied to real estate. There are rent seeking practicess in all sorts of industries.
A construction company building houses and selling them isn't rent seeking, but they are in the real estate industry.