Rentalists vrs Capitalists

Is it more useful to think of the contemporary US as a rentalist economy rather than as a capitalist economy?

Here I use the word rent in the economists' sense:

A return from a differential advantage for production, as in case of earnings due to natural resources, fertility, etc.; — as distinct from profit and wages.

Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, 1958

In more detail, as Stirling Newberry said,
(http://www.bopnews.com/archives/001255.html.)

... Rent does not reflect capital — a factory in the US is the same as a factory in China. The difference in costs is the rent paid for having stable laws, transparent mechanisms of government and the rest.

Capital consistently misprices rent ...

Why does rent exist? Because if you have something that others must rent, you can charge them almost anything for it. Rent is either very cheap, or very expensive. ...

In an economy like ours, there are three ways to gain income:

• from your own labor, as wages or salary;
• investments; or,
• benefits to you from government protection of your location, for example, from renting a factory that does not get stolen from you, or from renting a cheaply reproducible entity, such as a song, that a government is able successfully to forbid others to sell.

It is easy to see what happened in Russia:

Russia went from being state capitalist under Stalin as part of the then Soviet Union to becoming state rentalist under Putin.

• In the 1930s, Stalin pushed state capitalist development by reducing wages through induced famine in the Ukraine and the like, by forcing high levels of savings, and by using the results to build many factories.
• In the 2000s Putin increased state ownership of non-replaceable resources, such as natural gas, whose value depends on geographic and political location, and sold those resources to Europeans and Chinese.

It is harder to consider the contemporary United States a rentalist economy, but consider:

• In the first half of the 20th century, corporations and governments invested in education, roads, and factories.
• In the latter part of the 20th century, corporations and governments invested in extending copyright restrictions, in denying choice to cable television subscribers, and in restrictive and proprietary computer application standards.

Rather than see the 21st century as one in which conflicts will be among those who promote different paths towards equal opportunity, as Philip Bobbitt¹ argues in The Shield of Achilles, will conflicts occur between rentalists and capitalists?

After all, capitalists need a certain amount of stability to survive. They need the basics of a rentalist economy.

Even the mainland Chinese government decided against investing in Bolivia at the beginning of 2005, saying it was not going to spend over US$1 billion for fossil fuels. This occurred even though mainland Chinese managers know how to operate in corrupt and unstable environments.

One reason for the United States to continue its huge balance of payments deficit beyond 2005 is that the US appears to offer a better precautionary destination for money than Europe, which depends on the Russia government being able to guard its pipelines well. (See http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2005/02/scenario_cechen.html)

What if the US comes to look as bad a precautionary destination as other countries? Would it be enough for a dozen or so suicide soldiers, terrorists, to steal loaded gasoline or chlorine tankers and drive them into various Halburton offices?

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