One of the biggest triggers to revolution in any country is the concept of ‘rent-seeking.’ It’s a concept that’s largely foreign to us Americans, but perfectly understood by many people in other cultures. It’s the concept of someone exacting unfair payments over others because of some fundamental and resented privilege. If you were in the mafia, you would call it ‘skimming.’

Tommy Soeharto and all the Soeharto kids were perfect living embodiments of rent-seeking – what those guys did during Indonesia’s longest-running dictatorship was to either own or exact “protection money” from the airplane you flew in to Jakarta on, the airport you landed in, the taxi you got into, the toll road you rode to your hotel on, and the hotel itself you paid your room rate for. Every one of these things was a skimming opportunity for these Soeharto rent-seekers. Naturally, they grew immensely rich from this scam.

But notice that they created no value. That too is a telltale aspect of rent-seeking. All they had was political power. They leveraged it into vast fortunes for themselves.

Give Indonesia a national car company and these Soeharto kids suddenly controlled the national car franchises. Make Soeharto force Indonesian children to wear school uniforms, and they suddenly controlled the school shoe concessions.

Rent-seeking. It stinks, doesn’t it?

None of this is exaggeration, this really was the deal when Soeharto was in power. Rent-seeking. Generally, it makes people sick – it certainly made Indonesians sick – back in May 1998, they overthrew this whole rent-seeking crew and created one of the first modern democratic revolutions, anticipating the post-9-11 democratic revolutions and serving as a beacon to many Muslim states. I witnessed it from the very barricades when it happened.

Tyler Cowen has a marvellous item about how many different foreign words there are out there for ‘rent-seeking’ and what they say about the different individual cultures. It’s terrific. Read it here.