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Comment by kdmccormick | Hacker News Reader

I agree with your parallel to rent seeking. Rent seeking is indeed both (a) arguably immoral and (b) seemingly inescapable in a society which respects property rights.

The theory of Georgism [1] suggests a way that we could eliminate rent seeking: by taxing ownership of all common resources at the value of the rent they would demand. That way, property owners, telephone operators, etc. would be rewarded for their labor in development and upkeep of the property, but would not be rewarded for ownership of the property itself.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

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Rent seeking is not immoral. You own something. You choose to let others use it for a fee per month or per day. Some other person voluntarily thinks your deal is good and agrees to pay to use your something.

Sure, you can come up with some obscure examples of rent seeking being immoral, like charging a dehydrated dying person $1000 per glass of water, but that's not what we're discussing here.

If you disagree, let's make a deal where I get to use all of your stuff for free forever.

I’d argue rent seeking, whether moral or not, leads to a bad system with a class of people with vast wealth and no need to work, and a class of people largely without access to the same manner of income who have to labor for a living.

You're misinformed. You're describing rental, it's an understandable mistake, but despite the shared etymology, rent seeking is something entirely different.

It is by definition any scheme which extracts wealth without providing value. Renting apartments, or equipment, is not rent seeking. Putting a barrier in a river and refusing to allow passage of cargo without a tax, that, is rent seeking.

If you agree with me that a scheme to extract the wealth of others, while providing no value in return, is immoral, then rent seeking is, in fact, immoral.

Bad comparison. I am not seeking rent on any of my stuff.

Now, if I hoarded a bunch of stuff that other people needed and then charged them for access to it, that'd be rent seeking.

> Sure, you can come up with some obscure examples of rent seeking being immoral, like charging a dehydrated dying person $1000 per glass of water, but that's not what we're discussing here.

This is in fact what we're discussing, and your strawman example is ironically very on the nose. Except it's not water, it's housing. People are being forced to move away from my city or sleep on the street because the average unit rent is $3400 a month. The beneficiaries of this system are property owners who spend some money on development and upkeep (which they deserve to profit from) but largely just rake in passive income from having been lucky enough to buy when prices were low.

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