[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.