Comment by alextingle
3 days ago
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.
3 days ago
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.
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.
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.