Rent: It's a racket

As every tenant knows, rent is a racket. Landlords charge occupants of their property not according to what improvements they have installed, but to what renters are willing to pay to have a roof over their heads. A famous economist put it like so: a landlord prices property proportioned not "to what he can afford to take; but to what the farmer can afford to give." That economist isn't Karl Marx -- it's Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations.