California Construction Trucking Association (CCTA)

According to a variety of internet based sources, in economics, rent-seeking is an attempt to obtain economic rent or existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment in which economic activities occur, rather than by creating new wealth. For example: spending money on political lobbying in order to be given a share of wealth that has already been created. Trial lawyers and chiropractors are widely known to do this within the workers’ comp insurance industry under the guise of protecting and helping the injured worker.

Another famous example of rent-seeking is the limiting of access to lucrative occupations, as by medieval guilds or even firefighters unions today.

People accused of rent-seeking typically argue that they are indeed creating new wealth (or preventing the reduction of old wealth) by improving quality controls, guaranteeing that “charlatans” do not prey on a gullible public, and preventing bubbles.
Many current studies of rent-seeking focus on special interest efforts to capture various monopoly privileges stemming from government regulation of free enterprise competition.

The term itself, historically speaking, is derived from the far older practice of appropriating a portion of production wealth by gaining ownership or control of land that was than rented out.

Now let’s see about the trucking industry. Take a room full of large TL & LTL carriers who turn their fleets over 20-25% each year, add engine, DPF, and truck builders and their associations. They meet with EPA and CARB and hatch a regulation to make the small business owner of a truck solely responsible for fixing engine emissions based on contrived science and nebulous and exaggerated health effects. Then to add insult to injury, the group agrees to retroactively make previously EPA-compliant trucks non-CARB compliant, and those truck owners who cannot afford the expense to retrofit, repower, or buy new can become employees to those who can afford this scheme and then they join the Teamsters! We do recall the Consent Decree of April 30, 1999.

So now let’s see if you can pick-out the rent-seekers in this story?