Talk:Rent seeking

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	Business and economics Portal This article is within the scope of the Business and Economics WikiProject.
Start	rated as start-Class on the assessment scale
Top	rated as top-importance on the assessment scale

	Law Portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Law, an attempt at providing a comprehensive, standardised, pan-jurisdictional and up-to-date resource for the legal field and the subjects encompassed by it.
Start	This article has been rated as Start-Class on the assessment scale.
Top	This article has been assessed as Top-importance on the assessment scale.

[edit] How Rent seeking could be resolved

I believe that rent seeking could be resolved through different means.economic awareness of their own political development must be present, to choose the right leaders who would abide by the constitutions fairly with the society. No to discrimination and filled with pride must be invisible. having the right leadership skills and right leaders would surely rejuvenate the falling countries. so as, you could also avoid rent seeking through the trust of these elected leaders. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 210.213.247.66 (talk • contribs) .

"No to discrimination and filled with pride must be invisible." Hear, hear.

This page is basically an essay on rent-seeking, not an article. The NPOV stuff should really go.

I think you meant the POV stuff. Anyway, I've tried to bend the article a little more towards NPOV by characterizing many statements as expressions of criticism rather than flat assertions of fact. The article still slants against rent seeking, however, which may be inevitable because the term itself is perjorative. Casey Abell 02:33, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

Some POV has been snuck back into the article by pushing many comments towards flat statements of fact rather than expressions of critical opinion. I'm not going to get into a revert war, but this article frankly falls foul of NPOV. The key problem is that "rent seeking" is more an accusation than a genuinely scholarly concept. No writer ever compliments somebody on rent-seeking, or even uses it as a neutral description. It's always an allegation of nefarious or at least unhelpful conduct, often used by political partisans against their favorite hate-objects (for instance, corporations and conservative governments for left-wingers, labor unions and welfare recipients for right-wingers). It may actually be impossible to write a truly NPOV article on this subject, but we should make a better effort than the current version. Casey Abell 21:26, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

How is this different from, say, market failure? That too can be an accusation, but it is also a genuine scholarly concept, as is rent-seeking. --FOo 23:38, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

I'd like to see fairly extensive comment in the article about how "rent seeking" is often used as an accusation for political purposes. Truth to tell, I think the term is usually employed that way. For instance, see the Leon Felkins article in the external links section. He uses "rent seeking" allegations to push a political point of view on various issues — "corporate welfare", Bosnia, public television. I think you could get sources for such a section and write it in a reasonably NPOV manner. But I didn't want to get into a stink over the article. After all, I came here as part of the wikification project and was at first interested only in technical fixes (section headings, a toc, ref/cite footnotes, external link descriptions, etc.)

But after I started on the technical things, I noticed a lot of the "NPOV stuff", as this page puts it. So I modified some of the language to nudge the article in a more NPOV direction. Sure enough, several of those edits got reverted or heavily modified.

I don't want to edit war over this article (or any article). But I would like to see a more neutral approach here, including some healthy skepticism about claims of "rent seeking" tossed around by political partisans attempting to discredit their opponents. Casey Abell 01:08, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

I think the best way to resolve any NPOV questions would be to pull all of the examples to the end. Start with a technical definition (which is good as it stands) Procede to a discussion of why it's bad (the economic factors), then quibble a bit with an overlap section (ways rent is created in an acceptable manner, I.E. regulatory actions that protect consumers but also create rent due to the barrier to entry). Finish up with your discussion of the difference between actual, platonic rent-seeker behaviour, and what we actually see here in the real world. At the very end, set up a list of situations that are accused of being rent-seeking behaviour, I.E. the Taxicabs, Marriage Taxes and doctor's licenses. Give each it's own minisection and let people slug out the individual examples data AFTER all the terms have been defined. Granite26 (talk) 19:17, 27 March 2008 (UTC)