I really must commend you for overcoming your natural murderous inclinations and managing to become a useful member of society despite the depression in your front lobe. Keep resisting those dark temptations!

The theory is that profit seeking is “good” capitalism, where you make money by increasing overall productivity and skimming the extra off the top, but rent seeking is “bad” profiteering where you use your leverage to manipulate the situation so you can derive income without increasing productivity.

So building a factory on your land is capitalism, but leaving the hovels untouched and charging high rent because your tenants have nowhere else to go is rent-seeking.

In practise of course lots of rent seeking behaviour is done by people who claim to be capitalists, so it’s at least a good way to argue with them on their own terms

Yeah, I’m a big fan of pulling out the concept of “rent seeking” as an ultimate evil and threat to capitalism, because you can explain why all the late stage capitalist horrors are actually anti-capitalist and get capitalists on side. Sometimes you don’t have to tear someone’s world view apart to get them to support making the world better