[randbox]

With economic rents the dilemma is not simply between doing stuff and having stuff. It's between having something which others can have as well (through reciprocal property rights) vs. claiming to own things which actually belongs to someone else (surplus labor resulting from enclosure of the commons) and then pledging what you don't own as collateral for loans.

[clairity]

you seem to be describing the tragedy of the commons, not economic rents.

[lukifer]

The author of the original "Tragedy of the Commons" paper lamented that he did not title it "Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons", later writing a follow-up by that name: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21236819/

And Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel in economics for her work describing the mechanisms used by real-world communities to effectively self-manage Commons: https://www.onthecommons.org/magazine/elinor-ostroms-8-princ...

[clairity]

i guess there's one situational intersection, alluded to by @randbox, between the tragedy of the commons and economic rents, which is when someone (illegally) takes control of the commons and literally charging rents for assets they don't actually own.

offhand, i can't think of a practical and contemporary example of this though.