> Landlords don't make money by providing a service or selling goods. They make money by sitting on something no one else is allowed to have.
Is that second sentence any less true of any other trade, including the traditional selling of goods? After all, the only reason you have to give a food vendor money for food is that the vendor (or someone on the vendor's behalf) will use violence if necessary to defend the vendor's exclusive claim on that food.
> Sure, they bought the land originally, but there's no more investment to be made after that.
That isn't true. There are maintenance costs and property tax, and less obvious things like the opportunity cost of risk of purchasing a house in order to rent it out.
The fact that Uncle Sam is the ultimate rent seeker is beside the point.
The difference between land and widgets is that widgets are continuously manufactured and sold. Once you sell me a sandwich, you can't take it back. It's mine. Rent is the opposite. They're not making more land, or spectrum, or whatever, and that's not what they're selling. They're selling access to it. And they can revoke that access at any time. The thing I'm paying for isn't mine, it's still theirs the whole time.
It is a little bit different. Commodities can be produced by multiple people and end up being the same thing. Now there are other factors involved I can contribute to economic rent being charged. For example, the hotdog vendor at the bottom of my building can charge 1.05 for the hotdog, whereas the guy at the other side of the park will have to charge .65 for me to walk past the guy charging 1.05. It's tough to get away from economic rent.
Is that second sentence any less true of any other trade, including the traditional selling of goods? After all, the only reason you have to give a food vendor money for food is that the vendor (or someone on the vendor's behalf) will use violence if necessary to defend the vendor's exclusive claim on that food.
> Sure, they bought the land originally, but there's no more investment to be made after that.
That isn't true. There are maintenance costs and property tax, and less obvious things like the opportunity cost of risk of purchasing a house in order to rent it out.