The goal of many economists is to increase the size of the pie. By this we mean that we want to increase the degree to which everyone in an economy gets what he/she wants. In a free enterprise economy, the incentive to gain wealth for oneself (the size of your slice of the pie) is in sync with the desire many economists have to increase the total size of the pie itself. This was most famously exemplified by Adam Smith within the Wealth of Nations in 1776 when Smith talked about the invisible hand, leading producers thinking about only their own self interest to serve the common good. When an actor in the economy gains by decreasing the size of the pie we economists call this rent seeking , and although hard-line members of the Austrian school would disagree, it is possible for rent seeking to occur without an initiation of force or fraud being present. An example of rent seeking I have been thinking of is that of bargaining. When a seller, Joseph, sells a computer for $50...