There’s a UK Georgist who is a follower of Fred Harrison, who put out a fantastic sweep of history, political science, and culture economics that deserves our attention, published on 5/23/26, entitled The Woke Rent Collectors. Here is the link to the paper and an audio version of it, less than 60 minutes long, plus an intro by Peter:
https://open.substack.com/pub/peeta462032/p/the-woke-rent-collectors
Peter’s Introduction
This essay advances a single, uncomfortable proposition: that the progressive social movements of the last century (women’s liberation, gay rights, environmentalism, multiculturalism and biodiversity protection) have been systematically co-opted by those whose primary interest is not human flourishing but the extraction of economic rent.
Reforms that would return economic rent to the people who create it are blocked, diluted, or reversed. Reforms that redistribute nothing but the language of progress and the symbols of diverse identity sail through. The result is not a ‘progressivism’ that liberates all, but one that makes the poor poorer and the rich richer, and a population that feels the injustice without yet having a name for its cause. In poor communities, progressivism is no longer associated with wages, housing, or security. It is associated with the priorities of people who already have those things. That distinction is doing enormous damage, creating a dangerous rejection of progressivism by poor communities and the dispossessed young. Societies that extract without limit and reform without economic substance do not drift peacefully into decline. They break.
Here’s my critique
Before I start, a few words must be defined in order to follow the argument herein. The word “rent” is an economic category that goes into what people call “profit,” say, when a businessman buys a tomato for a nickel, sells it to another for ten cents, then to another for a dollar … when the last transfer is complete and a customer pays two dollars for the tomato, you can say something a bit less than $1.95 is economic rent … we learned in Econ 101 that it’s an example of “what the market will bear.” The person who does that is a rentier, French for rentseeker. But, Ticketmaster was the master rentier, financializing every step of the sale and resale market for concert tickets, without regard to the underlying commodity, a band playing music people like to hear. If you understand this insanity, you will follow what you are going to read below, or listen to from Peter Smith in the link above.
There’s no better way to summarize this paper than to quote its ending message … there is an expanding segment of our society who extract financial benefits from an economy where hardly anything is actually produced … instead, a near infinite layering of interests who each charge and receive “economic rent,” i.e., unearned income on the backs of most of us trying to make our way through life. Peter says this arrangement (called rentseeking) is nothing new, in fact it’s a human pathology that lives and has lived in every institution we create or have ever created … it is NOW just more pronounced and it appears a correction is coming due.
To be honest, I hope this is the last time I hear the word WOKE … no matter who says it, either in defense of some identity or criticism of a professed identity. It is a diversion away from something more important, and that something is what (economists known as) Georgists remind us all … unless the social order we construct through laws or custom captures the unearned wealth that greater production generates (as in monopoly rents), escalating land values (under the homes we buy), or expanding financial values (as in the concert ticket example, above, borrowing for college, or for just living better than perhaps we can afford to do), no matter what we try to do, we will always lose out to those whose living is to not earn anything.
There’s only one word of caution to keep in mind, but it’s not really that important once you are on board with the message of opposing the rentier … and that is the so-called climate advocacy … I don’t say climate science because the word “science” implies doubt about reality, something that few climate advocates express … they are convinced CO2 and methane are killing the planet, although historic evidence suggests the Earth has gone through earlier periods of high and low temperatures, and high and low carbon emissions. In fact, since the end of the Little Ice Age around 1850, global temperatures are estimated to have risen by 1.4 degrees C, something you should expect after a low point, so another degree or two is really no problem, especially when you realize that the global temperature that Earth experienced during the Roman Warm Period between 250 BC and 400 AD, was approximately 2 degrees C higher than what was experienced over the last 2,000 years. But, just hold that thought for a moment.
Because rentier interests have highjacked the worry about climate, in line with every other avenue open to them. Take the European Union Carbon Trading System of 2005, where the rentiers created an illusion of doing something about climate … by creating a market to trade emission credits. In one example, mentioned in the audio, old growth forests were valued very low but newly planted grasslands high, so that forests were clear cut for grasslands for huge carbon credits, when the reality was that the trees had many benefits, including sequestering carbon, but also wildlife habitat, the moderation of temperatures and filtering of water. Rentiers benefited, the environment did not.
And it does not end there … the Net Zero scam. Peter calls Net Zero a “finance product.” In all such efforts to limit carbon fuel usage, Green Bonds are issued, and purchasers paid a premium that went to rentiers controlling the system, not to do anything for the environment.
The bottom line on all this is that the Progressive Movement of the last 60 years has been highjacked, and elites as rentiers engineered it, making it seem that as people are “liberated” from patriarchy, sexual norms, or a polluting culture, we should have seen a better life, but nothing will change as long as the capture of economic rent is taking place without ordinary people, you and I, in the room to share it. Identity politics is fine and dandy, but don’t think that any major social ill will be fundamentally changed; the distribution of wealth when you were a man is about the same as when you became a woman unless you also became a rentier.
Listen to Peter’s excellent paper/audio. It’s hard to visualize reality the same after you do.
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