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"Rent-seeking" is referring to something different than literally seeking rent money. It's basically when people lobby the government to get special favors for

• pash 9y ago
  To expand on that: “Rent” is a term of art in economics that means a “payment to an owner or factor of production in excess of the costs needed to bring that factor into production” [0]. Economic theory shows that in a perfectly competitive market the price of a good equals its marginal cost of production. So prices above marginal cost demonstrate either a lack of competition in the market or other deviations from the theoretic ideal that give producers what economists call “market power”, the ability to charge higher prices for a good than they should be able to charge in a market in which many producers compete to sell more or less indistinguishable items. Financing costs and all other costs are included in this calculus, so economic “rents” (as a term of art) in the context of the rent charged on homes and other real-estate means something like “excess profits due to a dysfunctional market”; in this case the dysfunctionality of the market is largely the result of regulation that prevents local supply of housing to rise to the level of local demand. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_rent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_rent