Economic Rents create lost opportunities for exchange. A cost. They grant a privilege whose results are incalculable (unavailable because profit and loss are externalized) and therefore unmeasurable (comparable with other investments) and invisible (they are forgotten and never rise again), instead of creating a calculable, measurable, investment and return for the polity.
Unfortunately, democracy – majority rule – forces us to create these lost opportunities to exchange rents and privileges which are incalculable.
Furthermore, the pooling of taxes into general funds, rather than charging fees for services, for the payments of debts, and collecting returns on investments, create opportunities for rents. It is this system of rents that we systemically MUST construct under democracy. Democracy does not let us do otherwise.
Worse, it is this system of rents, that allows the predatory and parasitic rent-seeking bureaucracy to exist, and expand like a cancer uncontrollably.
Conversely, if we enforced (a) a universal requirement for operational calculability, (b)universal standing for the prosecution of rent seeking, (c) and the negotiation of contracts, rather than the competition for rents in order to obtain power necessary to issue laws (commands), then it is impossible to seek rents. And even if rents are somehow obtained, impossible to hold them.
Yet enforcing (a)(b)(c) does not require that we abandon the construction of commons. Only that we abandon the rentiers. So while it was necessary to centralize rents in order to extinguish family, guild and tribal rents, it is now equally necessary to ban rents permanently.
All that is required is contracts instead of laws, universal standing, and operational calculability.
