This is the Cato Daily podcast for Thursday, September 7th, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Rent-seeking is typically understood as receiving benefits from the public by leveraging government power.

But the Tullic Paradox asks this, why is there so little rent seeking?

At Ficon, I spoke with Matthew Mitchell of the Mercatus Center about how we might resolve this long-standing paradox.

What did Rent Seeking look like when Tullick wrote his

understanding at the time of what rent seeking actually was.

So,

rent seeking actually was.

Yeah.

So, 1967, Gordon Tullick writes an article,

the welfare costs of tariffs monopolies and theft.

And it's basically an examination of what happens

when people expend resources trying to determine the allocation of wealth,

either redistribute wealth or obtain some sort of larger share of economic surplus.

So what did it look like?

Well, as the title implies, he was looking at three things.

Tariffs, which are a redistribution from consumers to

of economic surplus from consumers to domestic producers

monopolies which are a redistribution of economic surplus from consumers to producers, and theft where people just steal stuff, right?

And there's this crazy, it sort of seems crazy in retrospect, but there's this longstanding economic idea that theft is not economically costly.

It's not socially costly.

...