The term "economic rent" or just the unadorned term "rent" as used in political economy is defined succinctly as follows:

Rent is labor or goods expropriated through the ownership of an unearned essential resource.

The simplest example of rent is the rent of land. A simplified explanation of land rent is available at the Henry George Institute website as The Law of Rent. But in the presentation the words "landowner" and "owner" are employed. These terms are so subsumed into our modern society as to become accepted standards without basis. Ask yourself what prevents the newcomers to the land in the example from simply using the best land and telling the current "owner" to take a hike. The answer is that overwhelming force on the side of the current owner secures his land "rights". You may retort that morality precludes the use of the best land by the newcomer and you would be somewhat correct. It is the shared belief in property rights that would grant overwhelming force to a government in the protection of such property rights. It is also the shared belief in property rights that allows a well armed and powerful owner to maintain control of his property without spending all of his time at that particular chore. For property rights to exist they must be secured by force. Rent cannot be extracted unless there is sufficient population in actual need of the resource and the ownership of the resource is established and defended with force.

We then have the modern updated definition of rent which is designed primarily to hide the fact that rent is unearned and the expropriation purely a matter of force. A copy of such a definition, a representation of the current "economics profession" version of rent can be found at Economic Rent.

And here we see the attempt to confound and confuse the term rent in such a way as to make it some benign happenstance and to separate it from its true nature. In using a "soccer star" to demonstrate rent the trained seal economist seeks to confuse rent so as to avert one's eyes from both the need of force and the "unearned" nature of the "owned" resource. The star's skills are inalienable. Unlike the land owner and the land, the star can't be disposed of and the skills then used by an invader. Once the star is gone, the skills are also gone. Ergo, there is no need for defensive force in securing the rights of the owner of the skills - a personal asset . The other rather marked difference is, of course, that the skills were naturally endowed and then perfected by the labor of the soccer star. He didn't just stumble into the land of milk and honey and plant a flag on a prime piece if real estate that existed before man ever came into existence.

But there are some similarities: We must concede that to the extent that there is unwarranted control of the entry into the field of "soccer" as controlled by the union known as the "soccer union" then to that extent is there a rent. And again we see that force is necessary to the expropriation. To what extent are the actions of the "soccer union" a mechanism to reduce the exploitation of soccer players by the owners of political power and to what extent is the soccer union employing force (government backed force of law) to limit competition and increase the reward to the current players? value is being expropriated (rent taken) only to the extent that the soccer union is operating in the latter capacity. What is also missing here is the "essential" nature of access to the resource. One does seek out soccer matches for sustinence but for entertainment value. In the case of the sports star there is absolutely no force involved because the decision to consume the entertainment offered by the sports star is strictly voluntary. Yet we see this used as an example of rent by many of the trained seal latter day economists.

Rent is labor or goods expropriated through the ownership of an unearned essential resource.