From the comments here:
I suggest that the payment for queue jumping is not rent, but the premium paid for convenience and saving time.
Would you classify the premium paid for supersonic travel as 'rent'? Or the taxi fare versus the bus fare plus a walk at both ends for the same journey?
Anything collected by government is tax.
DP
A good way of defining "rent" is "premium paid for convenience and saving time". The magic word is "premium". Consider: it costs the same to build and maintain a home in a good location for commuting or in a bad one. People will pay more for the former, primarily for convenience and saving time, ergo the difference/the premium is "rent".
Tools and capital are labor saving devices, I use an electric drill not a hand drill for convenience and to save time. But there are enough competing drill manufacturers and the price of a drill is a fair price for making it, there is no premium and no rental element.
The Daily Mail article explained that doing a certain operation costs the NHS £5,000, but people will pay £14,000 if they can queue jump and get it done next week. That breaks down into £5,000 actual cost of service provided and £9,000 rent.
Anything collected by government is tax.
Nope. If the NHS i.e. the government collects it, it is £5,000 cost and £9,000 rent. If an NHS surgeon takes the day off and does the operation privately for £14,000, it is £5,000 cost and £9,000 of it is rent.
The fact that the NHS i.e. the government collects it does not make it a tax. A tax is an arbitrary payment with no relation to cost or value of services provided to the individual taxpayer. So VAT, income tax and National Insurance etc are taxes.
Would you classify the premium paid for supersonic travel as 'rent'?
Not a live issue, let's take a real life example
I recently flew Stansted to Edinburgh and back for £49, car parking for a day also cost £49. There must be a small rental element to the £49 ticket price or else the airline would not be able to afford the Air Passenger Duty, but for the sake of this discussion, let's assume it's £nil and £49 is for cost of services.
The price for parking a car is nearly all rent (apart from a few pence for maintaining the tarmac).
London to Edinburgh is 332 miles. London to Paris is only 214 miles, but return tickets cost (say) £200 and upwards. Therefore three-quarters of the London-Paris ticket price is rent; one quarter is for actual cost of services. Of course, the government collects some of that rent in Air Passenger Duty, landing fees etc, but it is still rent.
"Or the taxi fare versus the bus fare plus a walk at both ends for the same journey?"
The cost per passenger of ferrying one passenger is clearly higher than one seat on a bus so of course it a taxi will cost more. In a free market, the taxi driver is charging for cost/value of services provided with no rental element. If there is a restriction on the number of taxi driver permits, then taxi drivers can charge a bit more; that excess is rent (as measured by the value of a taxi permit on the gray market).
There's no point being too scientific about this or pretending that there must be one all-defining way of describing it, but you know it when you see it.
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