Rent seeking

An example of rent-seeking behavior from The Wall Street Journal:

At times, Mr. Ulizio finds it all a bit surreal. "We mine and sell sand. Sand. That's all we do. We aren't the evil empire. We aren't manufacturing some exotic chemical that we're unleashing on the world. We're taking sand out of the ground. We don't even process it, except to clean it up a little and size it. And we are selling something that has been around forever, the dangers from which have been known since well before anybody involved in this litigation was even born," he says.

He looks at me as if to say, "Can you believe it?" I wish I could tell the tort warrior I couldn't.