Libertarians used to wax eloquent against a concept called "rent-seeking." Rent seeker refers to people who try to inject themselves into the economic equation without actually creating anything of value.
The idea isn't restricted to the landlord by can refer to activities from interest bearing loans to insurance and taxes.
Personally, I don't think rent-seeking is a big problem on a micro scale. For example, there are people on HIVE who seem more intent on finding ways to harvest HIVE than in contributing to the community.
Rent-seeking is annoying on a micro scale.
I think it becomes exteemely dangerous when employed on a macro scale. Yesterday, I looked at how Apollo Global Management used Chuck E Cheese to inject themselves into the lucrative arcade market. They did this with a billion dollars in junk bonds.
That sticky little pizza parlor that parents detest had over a billion dollars in debt!
As I study the market, I am finding more and situations where companies are buried under insurmountable debts.
A large number of companies such as Sears, JC Penneys, Staples and numerous other firms flounder around with debts that are un payable.
The US Debt Clock shows that our Federal and State governments are floudering about with unmanageable debt loads.
The mortgage crisis at the heart of the Great Recession was created by rent seeking. Mortgage brokers made billions in closing costs buy coaxing people into taking out loans they could never repay.
Unfortunately, few people seem interested in substantive economic reform.
Rather than seeking reform. People riot in street demanding more and more freebies.
I am not sure if the term "rent-seeking" does an adequate job describing the problem. The problem we face is that we are now in an economy dominated by financial schemes that are systematically destroying the productive parts of our society.
For the photo, I simply snapped a photo of a monopoly.
Hey, I'll make a deal with you. I will split the rewards for this post 50/50 for anyone who upvotes it! (unless, of course your HP is small and your curation rewards gets swept away as dust.)
LOL speaking of rent-seeking, that's all curation rewards are. Ain't no way to decline 'em AFAIK, though.
As bad as rent-seeking is across private industry, politicians seeking rent are immensely successful at it, as the ubiquitous process of moderately well off local politicians with ~$1M or so earned move up to the federal level and gain tens of millions of net assets reveals. Graft, kickbacks, and various lobbying mechanisms have made some of the longer serving Senators hundreds of millions, particularly if they're on useful committees that determine what they should fund in national security, surveillance analysis, pharmaceuticals, and finance.
It's become not only life-threatening to common folk, it's a threat to civilization itself. There's a record of imperial collapse going back millenia, and financial shenanigans feature in all of them, perhaps best illustrated by Rome debasing it's currency until it's silver coins had hardly any silver in them at all.
Sure looks familiar today, with the rampage to throw conjured $T's into the market under Blackrock's thrifty management (~$30T or so today). Just why would Congress delegate it's fiduciary duty to a private concern to such an extent if they weren't raking money in their private, personal back doors for pushing it out the front doors of government with bulldozers?
The pretense of pandemic across jurisdictional levels surely induces Pavlovian salivation in the pharmaceutical industry, as the prospect of forced vaccination for the common cold has been orchestrated in a mere ~6 months of fear-mongering propaganda by state institutions, the enemedia (practically an internal division of the CIA), and the rabidly terrified Karens they feed off.
I saw a friend of mine today who has long been married to a Karen, has also raised one to her 40's that also lives with him (rent free of course), and who earlier in the year collapsed a lung, making it difficult for him to breathe under the best conditions. His daughter and bride nearly make him wear a mask at home, and I've seen him almost pass out after trying to discuss matters with a mask on, sweating profusely, and ruddy cheeked.
I'm actually happy my own personal Karen decided to get rid of me but keep all my stuff a decade ago. Watching his women henpeck him to death, I reckon the price of everything I'd ever owned a bargain for the peace I enjoy today.
But I digress. Rent seeking by our national vermin today has produced the delicate razor's edge American domestic peace rides, and I have no confidence those vermin are particularly concerned about preventing the fall into actual war. All too often such parasites just see war as an even greater opportunity for profiteering. I have long recommended Smedley V. Butler's 'War is a Racket' as a brief but compelling exposition of war racketeering from the pen of an American General Officer and war hero. Pandemic and Identitarian profiteering seem identical to war profiteering to me.
Rent seeking isn't just an annoyance when government officials do it. People die in droves, and empires collapse.
Hope I am still able to benefit from your posts on the other side of this ongoing imperial implosion.
Thanks!
Wow you read the whole post and caught my jab about the curation structure. We are all trying to get our cut of the HIVE inflation.
I don't mind the curation reward especially when the reward encourages people to engage with the platform.
I thought about trying to point out that politicians (and their families) tend to become multimillionaires while in office. They clearly aren't creating. Their money is coming from rent placed on the economy at large.
Many activities can be described as rent-seeking ... such as salaried employment. People want a regulated income regardless of economic conditions. Rent seeking activity is somewhat limited in the private sector because businesses are still constrained by market forces. It can get completely out of hand in the public sector.
Curation rewards actually discourage engagement, or any qualitative consideration of content whatsoever. The Rentseeker intent on curation rewards considers financial return on their activity, which involves metrics regarding the history of the content provider's rewards on their posts, not the content itself, and the mechanisms that determine how curation rewards are distributed, particularly being first to curate, but after the initial exclusion window. This requires automation to optimize, and that alone precludes any potential human engagement with the content.
All prior social media platforms that enable up and down votes did not provide means of monetizing those votes. Even the most cursory examination of such voting reveals that no monetary rewards are necessary to encourage it. On Hive today downvotes cost flaggers without any reward, but this comment will reveal that such flags still fly.
While author rewards are necessary to direct the economic benefits of content creation to the creators of content, rather than oligarchs seeking rent from their centralized capital, curation rewards are a back handed mechanism to enable centralized capital, generally ninjaminers on Hive, to seek rent from their stake.
Curation rewards are not only unnecessary, they are utterly contrary to the stated purpose of decentralized media.
Wow, how did you know that you would get a downvote?
I joined SteemIt when they were presenting the platform as a mechanism for funding content. I was disappointed to discover that the rewards were not effectively funding content. I think the 50/50 split made the problem worse.
I still have a SteemIt account. I approach that platform with the question: How do I maximize my curation rewards? I discovered that I get higher rewards if I don't read the posts and vote solely on the upvote history for an account.
My curation rewards are higher if I don't read the posts. It is insane.
If you look at bots that are optimized for harvesting rewards, you will see that they tend to have a higher ratio of curation rewards to HP than people who are actively engaged in the platform.
I think your comments about downvotes on HIVE are off the mark. The downvote on Hive is the ultimate rent-seeker weapon. The primary purpose of the downvote is to protect the precious rewards pool. Everyone is attentive to the economic impact of the down vote.
Lets see the downvote of iflagtrash is worth $0.002. That systematic downvote of your comment took $0.001 from your author reward and $0.001 from my curation reward.
The proof that the downvote is a rent-seeker tool is the fact that the whales are using it systematically. Somebody actually wrote a computer program to downvote every post you post.
Rent-seekers tend to be very protective of the troughs from which they feed. The HIVE downvote was designed specifically to protect the trough.
I don't necessarily disagree with this. Crypto is built around game theory.
As for decentralized media. The world wide web is a better system for decentralized media. I still hold that web developers should concentrate primarily on their personal web sites and use social media to bring people to their sites.
Bernie flags all my posts and comments. It's easy to predict. You're also right about rentseeking and ninjaminers like Bernie, but flags are also useful to censor inconvenient content, by discouraging them as create it, like me. I am atypically unconcerned with my financial rewards, which allows me greater freedom to post forthrightly under flagging than were I accounting my wallet greater relevance to my purpose here.
I've done my best to discuss this with Bernie, and I think they've understood expending greater financial means in the effort to censor me just wastes their resources, so the flags are largely symbolic and the bot comments are the bulk of the impact on my content.
The oligarchy on Hive has learned to concentrate their combined stake for common advancement of their purposes, Bernie serving as the hatchetman for the team and mutual backscratching via witness votes serving to rebalance and compensate such expenditures.
Edit: regarding development of the web, I reckon the most critical development that could be undertaken today is of means to mutually provide content without being dependent on centralized structures. Mesh networking potentially allows free speech over the extant infrastructure despite the centralized control of the investors that own it. Without secure encrypted speech sovereignty will not long survive the imposition of martial law and forced genetic modification I expect by 2021, because it will be impossible to coordinate mutual aid and cooperation beyond immediate localities.
Given extant development lacking such purpose, I am planning on losing access to the internet by 2021. When boots hit US streets, censorship will start being undertaken at the end of rifled barrels, and that's only avoidable by not advertising your inclusion in the cull cohort. Without secure comms, only not using compromised comms fulfills that need.
I believe in balance. Classic economics was about finding balance.
In classic economics, "capital," "rent" and "labor" are means of production.
Modern intellectuals like to create conflict where balance is in order. Marx wanted to create a conflict between capital ownership and labor. So he wrote a dense tome called "Das Kapital" which presents a market that over emphasizes capital. He then wrote a "The Manifesto" to rise people in revolt against the strawman he created.
Rent is just something that exists in the economy. The Rent-Seeker overemphasizes rent.
In leveraged buyouts corporate raiders use junk bonds to take over companies. They then place the junk bonds on the balance sheets of the raided company. In this situation, the private equity firms are interest bearing credit in a situation better suited for equity investment. This stunt, creates a systemic fault.
I think the downvotes play a vital role in the Hive ecosystem. Yesterday I decided to drop three down votes on accounts that used uncredited plagiarized images.
Neither I nor Bernie disagree.
The conflict between labor and capital Marx envisioned was unnecessary to create, as it is a natural result of the interests of the actors, just as it is between predators and prey in the natural world. He may have intended to accelerate it, and I am incompetent to say whether he succeeded or not.
I lean towards not, as capital knows full well how to gauge it's ability to prosecute undertakings, and await nominal preparations.
While I am no Marxist, I see that today the conflict between capital and labor is about to become literal war. The cutting edge of technology is decentralization, and this is developing across all industries today. As means of production are distributed to individuals, the flow of resources to pools of capital - and the overlords that possess them - is diminishing, because making your stuff yourself is not a taxable event, nor creates trade, or at least greatly diminishes trade and profits.
Overlords aren't going to permit that to happen to them, and they will literally destroy civilization before allowing their control to lapse, regardless of consequences to their quality of life. They have only one overriding goal and purpose, and this is to be overlords. All else is subsidiary to that existential need, and the conduct of their entire lives reveals the fact.
However, physics is intractable. No matter they bribe or extort public servants, manufacturing concerns, or even society one individual at a time, the laws of physics mandate decentralization of the means of production until consumers produce all their goods and services, because it is more efficient.
So, war. It's happened before, I think. Perhaps we will be able to surmount this hurdle this time, and move civilization forwards. If we do, we will do so as free people, not lorded over anymore, for good or ill.
There is a key distinction between economic rent-seeking and the sort of rent that is a use fee for someone else's legitimate property.
If someone offers me lodging in exchange for money, and I accept, we call it 'rent,' but it is an economic good being exchanged for mutual benefit.
Taxation, traffic fines, licenses, etc. are examples of economic rent. No market good or service is being offered. Instead, wealth has been sunk into a wasteful enforcement system in hope of plundering people for profit.
This is only viable in the long run under government monopoly. The market offers choice, and such bad actors can't maintain their schemes when participation is voluntary.
I really don't like the term "rent-seeking." The term actually makes it sound like the problem is with property ownership. I've never seen anything wrong with renting out the things one owns.
The term is nice in that it starts people thinking about economics.
Perhaps the problem is one of scale. Small investors who rent apartments in the communities where they live are a benefit to the community.
I am worried a bit about the huge REITs that are starting to dominate communities with endless rows of stack-and-pack complexes. The big malls were developed as REITs and the stack and pack apartment complexes are REITs. Some have hundreds of thousands of units.
These are big wall street firms pulling the wealth out communities. At some point they are likely to come back and kick us. Look at how many of the malls have failed. The word is a good starting point, but I am not sure if it leads to the correct conclusion.
Centralization, debt financing and other terms might do better.
The REITs are rent-seekers when they lobby government to enforce laws restricting people from choosing alternative housing and retail options. Zoning laws are rooted in racism, classism, and cronyism.
Malls are dying because the model on which they were built was always unsustainable, and the crash the 2007 revealed the weakness in malls especially when confronted with the reality of online competition. They were an experiment that is due to fail.
I suspect real estate in general along with the stock market is a bubble being reinflated with the money supply inflation from so many rounds of QE. The money flows to the coffers of the connected as always. But when the bubble bursts, they will be left holding the bag. Too bad the tax system forces so many average folks to rely on the stock market for retirement too, though.
One thing that disturbs me about the huge REITS is that they seem to be able to get zoning concessions when local property developers are unable to get concessions. Zoning commissions will not allow people to build fourplexes, but they roll over for political connected concerns wanting to make a stack and pack. A hundred free standing fourplexes would do more for a community than a megacomplex with 400 apartments.
Es evidente que la economia se va desgastando, por los grandes buitres, pero todo tiene un fin, gracias por compartir, te dejo mi post y te sigo.
Yup, it's sad to behold, comical but sad how clueless people are. It's all a big irresponsible game of kicking the baggage down the line, to pay back loans and interest as a burden for future generations. It's how government and the Fed are operating, just fleecing the tax slaves of today and tomorrow while they bail out the scammers in failing businesses. The scammers on Hive have long convinced people of how much they are for the "community". Bid bots, bid bots that were "better" than others, now another "service" to suck money from the gullible.
The question of how do we create something of value is separate from the question of how do we profit from this creation.
Rent seekers are only engaged in that second question.
PS: Don't look now, but I think you have attracted a bot.