Great write up!

Rent seeking is one of the less intuitive concepts in economics, partly due to the name not applying to most modern rental arrangements. It's also mistakenly taken as an inherently bad thing for society, when it's quite context dependent.

In a more technical sense, rent is the amount you're able to charge above your marginal costs, in equilibrium. Sometimes this is bad (subsidies and barriers to entry), but sometimes it's just a feature of the world. Setting aside government favors, Iowa farmers extract huge rents because their land is extremely well suited to growing corn, but the corn price is set by marginal growers in drier states with worse soils. That allows farmers in Iowa to persistently sell at a price greater than their marginal costs.