In this excellent AIER article, Duke University professor Richard Salsman discusses the problem of “rent-selling.” You may very well have heard about “rent-seeking,” which is the term economists use for the practice of looking for ways to extract unearned wealth by obtaining favors from the government. But as Salsman observes, rent-seeking can’t happen unless there’s also rent-selling — in other words, officials who are willing to hand out the favors.

Salsman writes,

Political favors and disfavors can be codified in regulation, taxation, and/or subsidization. Rent selling is akin to the long-acknowledged phenomenon of influence peddling. Political influence can only be peddled (sold) if it first exists. The creators and supply-siders of political favors and disfavors include politicians, policymakers, and bureaucrats. Massive new sums of money are spent on politics, but that’s because so much politics is injected into money-making.

The effect of this phenomenon is to make the country poorer and more corrupt.

Read the whole thing.

Rent-seeking has grown by leaps and bounds in the U.S. over the last few decades because the government is so much bigger, with so much more power and so much more money. With hordes of agencies operating with little or no oversight, the rent-seekers are having a field day, but that’s bad for the rest of us.