I had a post on an approach to the Book of Mormon where you look at it from the perspective of the Church in our day — a small minority in a much larger culture. That post, with numerous examples and some illustrations, managed to evaporate. So, I’m posting the alternative post on “rent-seeking.”
Wikipedia has a long article on the topic at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
Like capture and other concepts it is a very important one to understanding many political and other features of modern debates.
In short, “Rent-seeking” consists of taking value from others without compensation and without making any contribution to productivity.
The term originates with gaining control of land or other pre-existing natural resources. In the modern economy, a more common example of rent-seeking is political lobbying to receive a government transfer payment, or to impose burdensome regulations on one’s competitors m — or preventing people from competing — in order to increase one’s market share.
But a huge part of what motivates both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street is the perception that others are engaged in rent seeking activities rather than producing anything of value.
What do you think?
Wheat & Tares 
An example closer to home: my grandfather Robert Henrey Marsh believed strongly in God. He also came to believe that all organized religion existed to get between God and man and wring money out — rent seeking without adding value. He had had some very bad experiences.
You can see something similar in the way various restoration groups have used the Book of Mormon. It generates a strong spiritual experience for many who read it. But does that validate any specific group that uses it?
I disagree with my grandfather and he was happy for his children when they found church homes (ours LDS, my uncle Catholic).
Of course that example shows just how far the behavior extends. Indulgences are pure rent seeking activity. Banning women from knitting as dangerous to their minds (and restricting it to a guild) is another classic example.
Stamp taxes? Ahh, that takes you into a gray area.
I just watched The Best Government Money Can Buy?, a movie that talks about how lobbyists have corrupted Congress. We should demand ethics reform from our congress, but they seem to like the money machine, and the Supreme Court thinks corporations are people too.
Interesting idea – I have never really looked at religion from the standpoint of rent seeking, but in the context of religious doubt, I can see why someone would draw this conclusion. I’ve generally seen “rents” however as something that required the influence of a third party similar to government. I wonder how that would apply to the analogy?
Cowboy, the question is whether or not rents are enforced, or just created by advertisement. Though in some countries, the state religion gets your donations collected by the government with the taxes.
MH — in Sarah Palin’s best editorial in the Wall Street Journal (which she credits to the consultant who basically wrote it), she discusses the need for more transparency and real corruption laws vis a vis lobbyists and the related cash flows.
You have the current issue solidly in place. Consider the Newt Gingrich, Dodd and Frank were 100% behind the bubble that has grown to threaten the world economy. Not a matter of their political party, obviously, a matter of lobbyist money.
Should be “consider that” rather than “the.”
So I checked out that Wikipedia article because i’m not up on this term “rent-seeking” one thing stood out to me:
“Rent, by contrast with these two, is obtained when a third party deprives one party of access to otherwise accessible transaction opportunities, making nominally “consensual” transactions a rent-collection opportunity for the third party.
Sounds like the whole “pay ten percent of your income in order to be cool with God” thing to me?
A lot of the time, rent-seekers grant access to otherwise unavailable transaction opportunities, like with the relationship between publishers and writers.
The behavior becomes the same, though. They’re able to control all the people who are actually producing things, simply by virtue of sitting on top of the means of production (like a printing press or a broadcasting center) and refusing to budge.
It’s things like this that socialists talk about with “abolishing private property.” They don’t want to take plushies away from kids, they want the actual producers to control the means of production through co-ops and things. Not to have it held over their heads to make them jump, by someone who doesn’t produce anything at all.
The Internet helps to equalize some things, like by creating the Bloggernacle and otherwise helping writers and creatives produce without needing a rent-seeking gatekeeper. There are a lot of other industries out there, though, and (as SOPA demonstrates) they’re trying to lock this one down too.
This is, IMO, the major problem with our economic system today. Making money and gaining influence simply through money. It is the motivation that drove manufacturing out of this country and what motivations insane financial markets such as derivatives and spot market specualtion.
This is the mother’s milk of our now-corupt system and the reason the distribution of wealth goes from the poor and middle class to the rich.
I think “rent-seeking” as comment 1 applies it to religion might better be termed “patronage”. In that guise, it IS endemic to all of Western Christianity because all of Western Christianity traces its earliest scriptures to a Mediterranean culture in which everything was pretty much characterized by patronage.
Crossan makes a good case that Jesus was so counter-cultural to the times because he was teaching and demonstrating what it meant to remove patronage from our relationships to others, and especially to God. I guess you’ve given me a post topic.