[alextingle]

"Rent seeking" has nothing to do with landlords and tenants. It's about buying legislation that forces people to give you money for nothing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

Tenants who rent property get something tangible in exchange for their cash - exclusive use of the property.

Just because the word "rent" is common to both, doesn't mean they are connected in any way.

[gfaster]

gp used "rent seeking" correctly.

The concept of "landlords do nothing while collecting passive income, therefore not creating any value but instead are just exploiting that they own the land" would be correctly described as "rent-seeking behavior".

[jojobas]

This equally applies to any investment income wouldn't it? Dividend, loan interest would all be classed as "unearned income" by a certain economic theory I won't name that keeps causing people suffering a century later. Don't do that.

[gfaster]

Investment is generally considered profit-seeking behavior (i.e. not rent-seeking). Building an apartment and renting it out is clearly profit-seeking behavior, but if you were continuing to rent it out doing the bare minimum to keep it from falling over 40 years later, that would be pretty clearly rent-seeking.

From this, we can conclude that there must be some point after an investment is made where continuing to benefit from it transitions to rent-seeking behavior.

[jojobas]

Would holding some stock 40 year after buying it for dividend also be rent-seeking?

Would rebuilding the apartment every so often straighten you back to profit-seeking?

Rent-seeking is just a meaningless insult if framed like that, it highlights no economically net-negative behaviour.

[pphysch]

Predatory loans were maligned as "usury" long before "rent-seeking" or Scary Marxists came along. For good reason. They're bad for society and the economy writ large.

[jojobas]

Classing all loans as usury help Europe back for a long time.

I guess you could class some rent as predatory as well, allowing others to use your property for a fee is not necessarily predatory (unless you're of "property is theft" kind).

[alextingle]

You should read the wiki article.

Criticising landlords is fine, but words (and phrases) have actual meanings, and the term "rent seeking" has literally no place in a discussion about landlords.

[gfaster]

I am well aware of what the phrase means, and I re-read the Wikipedia article to be sure. Maybe you read the use of the word in a different way than I did, but I helpfully included my precise interpretation of it in my comment to clarify the meaning.

> the term "rent seeking" has literally no place in a discussion about landlords

Having "literally no place" is certainly a strong choice of words, particularity as it was introduced in this thread as being a inaccurate label to apply to landlords.

Personally, I first learned about the term applying it to Feudalism, in which the (land)lords' only contribution was their ownership of the land. That example alone seems to pretty handily disprove your claim of "literally no place", in fact it's specifically cited in the Wikipedia article as the Georgist interpretation of economic rent.

[zzbzq]

Your own wiki link disagrees with you, most of the article uses landlordism as the base-level example. You've just discovered how "rent seeking" is used as a more broad term to describe many phenomena, but they're still describing them essentially in the metaphor of landlordism.

[JumpCrisscross]

> "Rent seeking" has nothing to do with landlords and tenants

They're orthogonal. In a competitive market, landlords earn no economic rent. In a market with supply restrictions, however, landlords will earn a return "in excess of the costs needed to bring that factor into production" [1].

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

[pixelatedindex]

> exclusive use of the property.

This is almost never true. Leases come with a million stipulations, and they get to decide what you can and cannot do. It’s exclusive in the sense that the landlord can’t force other tenants on the place you’re renting.

[sokoloff]

Exclusive does not mean unrestricted.