Rent-seeking in a modern economy is spending money on political lobbying for government benefits or subsidies in order to be given a share of wealth that has already been created, or to impose regulations on competitors, in order to increase market share.The concept of rent-seeking would apply to corruption of bureaucrats who solicit and extract bribe or rent for applying their legal but discretionary authority for awarding legitimate or illegitimate benefits to clients.
Regulatory capture is a related concept which refers to collusion between firms and the government agencies assigned to regulate them, which is seen as enabling extensive rent-seeking behavior, especially when the government agency must rely on the firms for knowledge about the market. Studies of rent-seeking focus on efforts to capture special monopoly privileges such as manipulating government regulation of free enterprise competition. The term monopoly privilege rent-seeking is an often-used label for this particular type of rent-seeking. Often-cited examples include a lobby that seeks economic regulations such as tariff protection, quotas, subsidies, or extension of copyright law.
Inequality means there is a gap between the highest income earners and the lowest income earners. On the one hand, you can argue inequality is necessary for providing incentives in a free market economy; without a degree of inequality there would be economic stagnation and lack of enterprise. On the other hand, you could argue that inequality has many disadvantages and is evidence of fundamental problems in society.
Arguably, inequality is a type of market failure. Market failure occurs when there is an inefficient allocation of resources in a free market. If firms have monopoly power, they are in a position to set higher prices to consumers. This leads to a redistribution of income from consumers to the shareholders of monopolies. Here, the inequality is based on an unfair distribution of power in society. Monopoly