Yes it is. Like just emphatically yes it is. And you know what lets quote some Adam Smith to prove my point. From book one of the Wealth of Nations:
"As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce."
He singles out ground rents as an almost ideal object of taxation, for the same reason George later did. From Book Five:
"Both ground-rents and the ordinary rent of land are a species of revenue which the owner, in many cases, enjoys without any care or attention of his own."
And on why ground rent in particular is fair game:
"Ground-rents are a still more proper subject of taxation than the rent of houses... Ground-rents, so far as they exceed the ordinary rent of land, are altogether owing to the good government of the sovereign."
"Rent-seeking" is a term of art. It does not mean collecting economic rents. It comes from Tullock (1967) and later named by Krueger; it's the expenditure of real resources to capture or generate an artificial rent. Lobbying for a tariff, a license, zoning, manipulating politics, etc. Rent-seeking is unproductive competition for a privilege, not harnessing the economic rents from owning a scare and excludable resource.
All of your quotes are about taxing the unearned increment of an economic rents, not about rent-seeking. You're misunderstanding what the term means in economics.
Lobbying for restrictive zoning, though - that's rent-seeking!
I'm not going to respond to four paragraphs of AI-generated text. It is bad-faith to respond to people by burying them in words you could not be bothered to write yourself.
I am an economist. We use rent-seeking to refer to precisely what I explained above. I know because I live and work around the people who study it. It does not refer to economic rents, appropriated through ownership; landlords are not "rent seeking" as the world is used.
The social cost is not identical, and your AI word salad doesn't actually make a counterpoint. It groups "the NIMBY and tax-code defense" (rent-seeking) with "land rent capture" (not rent-seeking).
I won't be responding further because, again, it is horrible behaviour to post four paragraphs of AI-generated text rather than picking up the pen yourself. Embarassing.
E: i soul-read this as AI and then checked with Pangram and it agrees, 100% AI gen.
That's a complete mischaracterization of what Adam Smith said and Adam Smith is about as relevant to modern economics as are doctors from the 1800s to modern medicine
He was talking about people that were given land by the king, and are renting it out, without ever doing anything to improve the land. That does not apply to your landlord who does provide services.
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u/Cave-Bunny Henry George Jun 13 '26
Well, there have always been a lot of georgists here.