[zygomega]

Rents can be seen as a future cash flow stream, at least partially protected from erosion by competition, that is a reward for past efforts. In a world where interest rates decline after the establishment of the rent, super-normal profits flow to the rentier. Keynes missed this in his 'euthanasia of the rentier' tirade.

[dnautics]

wrong "rent". rent in this case is "rent-seeking" which means seeking favor from government disbursal, regulation, or generally something which tilts the economic landscape in their favor (e.g. bailouts, FOMC operations, first-access to government-issued loans, etc).

[gozur88]

But the paper in question included "patent and copyright protection" and the entire financial sector in its definition of rents. That's just odd.

[zanny]

A loan is renting money. Patents and copyright are artificial state constructs to grant monopoly rental powers. You never "own" IP you buy from someone on physical media, you are buying a license to use it, or in other words renting it.

Rents by the OP's definition are the kind of revenue sources you wouldn't have in near-statelessness, which means it takes state bias to create them. Without a state it would be hard to lay claim to vast swathes of land peacefully, and homesteading would be abundant on unused land. Even in a simplified state model that offers courts to protect property rights with, you couldn't have the widespread real estate market manipulation we can simply observe with how out of control land prices have risen in the past twenty years.

[dnautics]

patent and copyright restriction is a HUGE rent. Even more so now that we're first-to-file and not first-to-invent. The financial sector subsists on two government-policy pillars. 1) access to lower-than-market interest rates on juicy loans which can then be flipped to the public at a higher rate (resulting in overall increased public exposure to the pain of systemic risk) and 2) secular inflation, which drives the general public into subsidizing corporate risk (via the stock market, e.g.) in order to be able to retire, since savings won't cut it.

And that's not even getting into bailouts.

[gozur88]

>patent and copyright restriction is a HUGE rent. Even more so now that we're first-to-file and not first-to-invent.

Technically to consider it a rent the copyright holder would not be producing anything, which just isn't true. Well, not for patents on genuine inventions.

The same is true for financial services. They do provide a service for the money.

[dragonwriter]

> Technically to consider it a rent the copyright holder would not be producing anything, which just isn't true.

Even by the (overly restrictive, IMO, as it excludes economic monopoly rents that are not derived from government-granted monopolies), copyright and patent are sources of rents drawn on the government-issued monopoly right to exclude others from duplicating the covered subject matter (or, in the case of patent, even independently developing it).

Even that restrictive definition upthread does not included the requirement that the rent-seeker was not required to produce something in order to secure the government-granted privilege from which it extracts rents.

[AnimalMuppet]

And, via zoning restrictions, ordinary rent from real estate.