I agree with the author about the problem with rents; unfortunately this argument is almost always framed politically (including, probably not intentionally, this article).
The arguments he is making are logical, but the premises he is using are only true in the academic economics echo chamber. For instance, he doesn't even mention the fact that government is, almost by definition, either the largest or second largest rentier in modern America (their main competitor being "to-big-to-fail" financial institutions). This is probably unintentional on his part but not on the economists he mentions such as Tom Piketty and Paul Krugman, because of their personal politics. To exclude government from this discussion is probably not correct.
It is not hard to see evidence of this by the way... take healthcare.gov for instance. If your company had $500 million CASH to build a website, what level of quality could you produce? Government also encourages rent seeking by other actors in the economy, even leads to rent seeking becoming the main game in town. Real entrepreneurs end up getting hurt by this because it steals away resources from their customers. Also economists like Piketty and Krugman then paint all companies with a broad brush and advocate that their legitimately earned profits be redistributed, which thankfully the author of the article seems to be defending against.
The arguments he is making are logical, but the premises he is using are only true in the academic economics echo chamber. For instance, he doesn't even mention the fact that government is, almost by definition, either the largest or second largest rentier in modern America (their main competitor being "to-big-to-fail" financial institutions). This is probably unintentional on his part but not on the economists he mentions such as Tom Piketty and Paul Krugman, because of their personal politics. To exclude government from this discussion is probably not correct.
It is not hard to see evidence of this by the way... take healthcare.gov for instance. If your company had $500 million CASH to build a website, what level of quality could you produce? Government also encourages rent seeking by other actors in the economy, even leads to rent seeking becoming the main game in town. Real entrepreneurs end up getting hurt by this because it steals away resources from their customers. Also economists like Piketty and Krugman then paint all companies with a broad brush and advocate that their legitimately earned profits be redistributed, which thankfully the author of the article seems to be defending against.