This is technically correct( the best kind of correct! 
). But at least IME growing up with and around Marxists, that application of the phrase rentier to residential landlords was fairly common. Usually more forcefully expressed when I was young and then mellowing with age as some aging Marxists became landlords themselves on a small scale ;).
In a feudal society the most important people are the aristocrats because they are the warrior caste and they keep other people from coming in and killing your family and stealing your stuff. To give these warriors the correct incentives they are given huge tracts of land so that any attack on the country is an attack on them. These people spend their days practicing fighting and rely on the peasants to supply them with food and other goods.
In time individual warriors became less important, but the structure of society had not changed so aristocrats were less warriors and more layabouts. These are the landlords Marx had in mind.
One of the big mistakes in Marxism is to equate capitalists with the landlords. To them owning a factory is just like owning a farm, farms generate wealth regardless of who owns them, however factories run generate vastly different amounts of wealth depending on who owns them.
I feel like you missed the part where I said I’m not a state socialist and the USSR was a hellpit only authoritarian tankies deify
Yes, the Feudal concentration of land contributes a large part to anarchist theory in particular. The idea is that the feudal lords through increasing power grabs came to “own” more of the land which used to be common land, and merely let peasents/serfs use it, on the condition the lords were entitled to most of what was grown/made. Then, when the bourgeois revolutions happened, this ownership was tranferred to the merchant class/then middle class in the form of capitalist property ownership.
I don’t have much problem conceding that landlords can be lumped in the rentier class, and certainly landlords are going to be the rentier-type people in easiest punching distance for most people. I’m just saying that the “rentier class” as described by Smith and criticized by Marx really isn’t specifically about landlords.
Marxists don’t specifically hate landlords; they hate a broader class of economic behavior of which landlords are a small part.
Many right-wingers hate rent-seeking as well, they just tend to call it “danggone gub’mint regulations” and are selective about the aspects that they hate.
I believe a Marxist might even argue that, in a sense, feudalism was preferable to capitalism because tenant serfs were had an inalienable right to remain on the land to which they were bound. The local baron or manor lord couldn’t arbitrarily raise the rent because his village was the next trendy thing in the region.
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I don’t know about that. Most conservative economic theory nowadays elevates property owners to the place of reverence that Marx gave to workers. If Marxist belief was that labor was the ultimate source of wealth, the modern equivalent is that ownership is the ultimate source of wealth. And property owners now denounce taxation as a form of theft just like Marxists used to denounce rent as a form of theft.
Again, for the 10th time, I am pointing out that when Marxists criticize rent-seeking behavior, they’re talking about something much broader than landlording. Here is another link explaining rent-seeking behavior.
When you show a conservative examples of rent-seeking behavior other than property rental, they correctly denounce it as corruption and graft (well - a pre-Trump conservative, anyway). If you point out that Marx makes the same denunciation, then their brains melt a little bit.
Standard modern economic theory is that both capital and labor create wealth.
There is a return to capital to compensate the owners of capital for their delayed gratification from consumption and for the risk inherent in capital accumulation.
Let’s say you get some money together from working - you can blow it right away on Doritos and beer, or you can use it buy a machine (or a house) to rent out. By investing in the machine (or the house) you are delaying the Doritos and beer, and probably taking a chance on losing it. So you deserve to be compensated.
That doesn’t conflict with the assertion that capital is vastly overstated by many in its contribution.
Everyone hates landlords, except for other landlords.
I think it’s worth emphasizing the difference between buying a machine, which didn’t exist in nature and had to be created by others, and buying land.
If you buy a machine, you’re making an investment in capital that will produce returns, and you’re paying those who built the machine (and the owners of the machines they used, which they paid for, etc).
If you buy land, you’re not paying for labor in any way. You’re buying an exclusive economic right to some part of the planet. You didn’t make it. No one made it. It preexisted us. You’re buying it from the current owner, who bought it from someone else, but if you trace the ownership back far enough, it basically always originated with someone using physical force to seize the land and force its inhabitants to pay you with their labor. And you are buying the ability to continue to enforce that requirement with physical force. It’s not hard to see how this starts to look pretty morally corrupt.
If you buy land with a house on it, then it’s a mix of the two.
The tenant isn’t laboring on or in the house. They just sleep and eat and watch TV and do other leisurely things there. Leisure, not labor.
I built the house with my labor.
If there is a problem with the house - I labor to repair it.
The tenant goes out and labors somewhere else to make money. They should have problem with not owning the fruits and focus of their labor, not their leisure.
Even other landlords! Damn landlords! They ruined landlording!
Governments: the biggest, nastiest, landlords of all.