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0 pointsfennecfoxen12y ago0 comments

Let's just play economist and call it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_seeking

> In public choice theory, rent-seeking is spending wealth on political lobbying to increase one's share of existing wealth without creating wealth. The effects of rent-seeking are reduced economic efficiency through poor allocation of resources, reduced wealth creation, lost government revenue, national decline, and income inequality. Current studies of rent-seeking focus on the manipulation of regulatory agencies to gain monopolistic advantages in the market while imposing disadvantages on competitors.

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bfe12y ago

The term "rent-seeking" is accurate within the study of economics, but is bound not to be understood accurately by lots of non-economists. It resembles a competing, everyday meaning that is inocuous: buying a property or other asset and renting it out is a valuable service, whereas "rent-seeking" is destructive. The term is economists' jargon that euphemizes the problem. If I were the chief of the rent-seeking lobby, I would want everyone to keep calling it "rent-seeking."

The term "economic central planning" emphasizes that it's fundamentally opposite to free market economics, and that its practitioners and defenders are hypocrites.

thecage41112y ago

Except that the terms "economic central planning" and "rent seeking" are orthogonal, even if the results are the same. You could, in theory, have economic central planning without rent seeking -- though it may not work that way in practice.

I think the above poster had it correct; refer to it as "crony capitalism" to non-economists.

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