Rent seeking is natural. That's why we get progress. Nobody would ever invest time and money to a business idea whose profits would get immediately competed aw

Rent seeking is natural. That's why we get progress. Nobody would ever invest time and money to a business idea whose profits would get immediately competed away. Everybody would on the other hand invest into a business with guaranteed profits which cannot be competed away - ie. a monopoly. That's producer's perspective. Consumer would on the other hand rather see competition among producers, because lack of competition leads to overpriced shitty products. However fierce competition leads to shitty and dangerous products too, because of need to cut corners and lack od funding for long term research (eg. current day airline industry). So there must be a middle ground. Some degree of rents (profit which cannot be competed away) is necessary for progress and product quality. There are several kinds of rents that I see. 1. Short term innovation monopoly These rents are usually short termed until they get copied by others. These are perceived to be fair and even if not, they have short life span, so who cares. Wait 5-10 years before the market catches up. 2. Rents from natural monopoly. Generally all network infrastructure falls under this because the first mover has great advantage over potential successors eg. by laying railroads, sewers, power grid or network cables in geographically optimal location. Other natural monopolies are eg. law or stuff which might harm you (drugs, pharma) - people prefer goods that everybody else uses and distrust smaller unknown alternatives. 3. Government blessed monopolies. For many industries it is more profitable to strangle competition than to better their products. Eg. patents, Mergers&Acquisitions, price undercutting and especially lobbying of regulations targetted against potential competitors - often in form of 'safety' regulations supposed to protect customers. Pharma industry would be a prime example. 4. Front running is another form of guaranteed income posing as legitimate business. In finance: you are a banker and your client asks you to buy a stock for him. You buy the stock for yourself, which hikes the price and then you sell it to your customer at higher price. In housing: you know that there is a massive trend of jobs concentrating in cities. You cheaply buy all land and houses in a prospering city, because you know that it will be needed by future generations. They will pay you huge rents later on. Nobody can stop you because your 'customers' are often not even born yet. In both cases you seemingly offered your customer a service which they voluntarily paid you for, but something feels fishy about it. All in all there are good rents and bad rents. How about distinguishing between the two and reversing the weird current tax system, which collects from the good ones (income, corporate and sales taxes) and giving to the bad bad ones (subsidies, redistribution). Since often the government guarantees some company a monopoly, why shouldn't it pay for that privilege. Monopoly based taxation seems to me like quite a fair tax system.