How an "anti-rentier" agenda might fail

[Die Neue Zeit]

http://www.salon.com/2013/03/21/priv...tor_parasites/

The term “rent” in this context refers to more than payments to your landlords. As Mike Konczal and many others have argued, profits should be distinguished from rents. “Profits” from the sale of goods or services in a free market are different from “rents” extracted from the public by monopolists in various kinds. Unlike profits, rents tend to be based on recurrent fees rather than sales to ever-changing consumers. While productive capitalists — “industrialists,” to use the old-fashioned term — need to be active and entrepreneurial in order to keep ahead of the competition, “rentiers” (the term for people whose income comes from rents, rather than profits) can enjoy a perpetual stream of income even if they are completely passive.

Rents come in as many kinds as there are rentier interests. Land or apartment or rental-house rents flow to landlords. Royalty payments for energy or mineral extraction flow to landowners. Interest payments on loans flow to bankers and other lenders. Royalty payments on patents and copyrights flow to inventors. Professions and guilds and unions can also extract rents from the rest of society, by creating artificial labor cartels to raise wages or professional fees. Tolls are rents paid to the owners of necessary transportation and communications infrastructure. Last but not least, taxes are rents paid to territorial governments for essential public services, including military and police protection.

While there are various forms of rentier payments, increased wages isn't one of them. Michael "Radical Center" Lind needs to go back to classical political economy. Taxes aren't, either, as it has been argued in that line of thinking that public infrastructure and related services should count as an additional "factor of production" alongside land, labour, and capital (Simon Patten).

Part Two: http://www.salon.com/2013/03/22/how_..._ruin_america/

Part Three: http://www.salon.com/2013/03/25/defe...s_rich_people/

And why this combination of semi-reasonable economic analysis with pseudo-"populism" might fail:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...ives-together/

However, there are problems. One issue is that free-market populists tend to only see problems where government is acting, consciously or unconsciously, to boost monopoly power. More reformist liberals would tend to see market power itself as something that occurs naturally and needs some sort of public accountability.

Hence reformers will look more to public regulation, public ownership or public competition to counter these issues. Public options, rate regulations, open-access regulation or public ownership are all among the many tools in the toolbox of curbing excessive market concentration. Conservatives, however, traditionally push for privatization of government services, even though this can just lead to more sophisticated versions of rent-seeking, cronyism, waste and unaccountability.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

This amounts to a very clear defence of private property. In no other context than the continuation of private property of some kind is there any need/demand/possibility for rent-seeking behaviour.

Monopoly capitalism, in addition, is nothing particularly different from free-market capitalism; it is just its present day form. A huge swathe of the marxist literature (going back to Sweezy, Hilferdung and even dear Vladimir Ilych himself) would agree with me there.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Actually, I wanted to repeat that most "anti-rentier" agendas are inconsistent. There's a reason why no Soc-Dem or Socred government has ever nationalized an entire national financial system.