Rents and speculation or any activity that allows someone to siphon off the productive gains of society that they had no hand in producing. For example, a comp

Rents and speculation or any activity that allows someone to siphon off the productive gains of society that they had no hand in producing. For example, a company in nowhere-ville develops Mr. Fusion (home edition) and needs to expand rapidly. Rents and land prices double overnight which results in the cost of labor rising which slows expansion. There are many opportunities for rent extraction in capitalistic systems and some degree of rent and speculation are necessary to establish a market but when society allows for excessive rent taking and speculation it becomes dead weight on productive investment. For example the “billion dollar industry” for sand that makes computer chips (https://www.wired.com/story/book-excerpt-science-of-ultra-pure-silicon/ https://www.wired.com/story/book-excerpt-science-of-ultra-pu...) is an example of companies with little or no investment in the technology around chips who were able to extract large sums of money simply by controlling a sand pile.