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.
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.
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.