Rent Is Theft??

There is a certain joy to be found in the Brobdingnagian (hey, spell check approves!) breadth and depth of stupidity that the Internet sends around the world every day. Today was no different: the notion that "rent is theft" intersected with my sensorium.

I've seen a lot in my decades of political perambulation, but this was a new one. Wondering if I had simply encountered "one idiot," a phenomenon I've set a loose rule to (as in, one idiot saying something shouldn't be given any heed), I threw the phrase into a search engine.

Lo and behold, there are Reddits, websites, Quora queries, and even T-shirts.

It’s a thing, and it’s a moment, which means it’s also bound to be a racket.

In retrospect, I'm not surprised in the slightest. People lusting after Other People's Money is as old as politics itself.

So, here I am, blogging about it. Let's break it down.

• Rent is... money exchanged for the use of someone else's property.

• Money is the prevailing mechanism of value exchange in most societies. It is a proxy for goods and services, and we can safely consider that money we've earned is our property.

• To steal something, i.e. for theft to occur, there must first be ownership of that which is stolen.

• If charging someone for the right to reside somewhere is "theft," this invalidates the presumption of ownership.

• This means that the renter doesn't have any legitimate personal claim to the rent money.

• Therefore, rent cannot be theft.

Yeah, yeah, I know the retorts. There are economists who happily engage in mental gymnastics to assert that ownership of land is not a sound concept - that there is no economic rationale for exclusive possession of a tract. This stems from anarcho-leftism, and it's usually justified by looking back at feudalism, when the "commons," i.e. land that was accessible to anyone and everyone to use and cultivate, was taken control of by the nobility, leading to the emergence of the serf class. As usual, this is veneer over naked avarice, an excuse to take the fruit of someone else's labor via force, whether that force be an anarchic "might makes right" or the more traditional "government is here to help."

I also get that some people draw a distinction between personal property and private property, and the special-case treatment that anarcho-capitalists apply to land.

When a project incorporates a natural resource (such as a piece of land) in a way that (reasonably) requires exclusive access, the Non Aggression Principle (NAP) becomes identical to property rights in the resource held by the person engaged in the project. For example, if my project involves planting a crop in a field (and assuming this is a peaceful project, i.e. not one involving a prior violation of the NAP), the NAP prohibits you from entering my field without my permission. The field becomes my property. However, if my project incorporates a piece of land in a way that doesn't reasonably precludes others from also using it, I gain use-rights that fall short of full property rights. For example, if I use a field for grazing my sheep, I can reasonably prohibit you from letting your dogs loose within it, but not from quietly passing through it.

All this is navel-gazing. The moral hazard, "tragedy of the commons" problems, counter-incentives, and the like make such ideas unworkable once populations grow past a certain (very small) size. Past that size, it's inevitable that government becomes the de facto "owner" of land, exerting ever-finer control over its use. Which brings us full-circle to socialism and other forms of statism. Which evinces Horseshoe Theory, and which serves as further evidence that weakened or "special-cased" property rights are a path to economic stagnation and decay.

More practically speaking, while there are some principled thinkers who envision a society structured in such a fashion, I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that the bulk of the "Rent is Theft!" bleaters aren't embracing a consistent set of principles, but are instead looking for an excuse to not pay it.

Besides, if rent can't be charged for living in an apartment or a house, how will the dwelling get maintained? You and I know full well that the renter will be loath to invest anything beyond the bare minimum, and if it runs down past a point of acceptability, the tenant will just leave. How will new housing stock ever come to market, if its ownership is not a thing?

Used to be,

That this is the product of too much government, rather than not enough, is unfortunately something that people don't want to hear. They want quick, personal remedies, not corrections that will bear fruit in a year or five or ten for the general populace.

But, now, with theft being normalized in so many ways by our Best-and-Brightest, any rent is too much, because Rent is Theft. That enough people heed this folderol to cause its propagation across the Net is yet another sign of social decay.