Rent Seeking Quotes

“Special interest politics is a simple game. A hundred people sit in a circle, each with his pocket full of pennies. A politician walks around the outside of the circle, taking a penny from each person. No one minds; who cares about a penny? When he has gotten all the way around the circle, the politician throws fifty cents down in front of one person, who is overjoyed at the unexpected windfall. The process is repeated, ending with a different person. After a hundred rounds everyone is a hundred cents poorer, fifty cents richer, and happy.”
― David D. Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism

“But the cruelest of our revenue laws, I will venture to affirm, are mild and gentle, in comparison to some of those which the clamour of our merchants and manufacturers has extorted from the legislature, for the support of their own absurd and oppressive monopolies. Like the laws of Draco, these laws may be said to be all written in blood.”
― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

“It's hard to beat signaling equilibria - because they're 'multi-factor markets' - which are special cases of coordination problems that create 'inferior Nash equilibria' - which are so stuck in place that market controllers can seek rent on the value generated by captive participants.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck

“…the end of the Cold War has brought not prosperity for all but a pitiless economic struggle for pole-position on the food chain of information capitalism. The neoliberalism and neocolonialism of the 1990s are the direct heir of the Manchester liberalism and colonialism of the 1890s, the only difference being that whereas Victorian rentiers extracted their Imperial textile-rents from the labor of the Great Unwashed, their postmodern analogues on Wall Street speculate on the viewing-rents of the Great Unwatched.”
― Dennis Redmond, The World is Watching: Video as Multinational Aesthetics, 1968-1995

“Inequality is much cited for its baleful impacts. In this book, we see inequality as a consequence as much as a cause; if the rich are allowed to enrich themselves through unfair processes that hold down wages, and raise prices, then inequality will certainly rise. But not everyone gets rich that way. Some people invent new tools, drugs, or gadgets, or new ways of doing things, and benefit many, not just themselves. They profit from improving and extending other people’s lives. It is good for great innovators to get rich. Making is not the same as taking. It is not inequality itself that is unfair but rather the process that generates it.”
― Angus Deaton, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism