Paying the Danegeld: Kipling, Rent, and the Mad Scramble for Loot

“And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we’ve proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld,
You never get rid of the Dane.”
— Rudyard Kipling, “Dane-Geld”

Rudyard Kipling warned us in verse what English kings learned the hard way in blood: you cannot buy off a predator. You cannot appease the parasite. If you pay the Dane-geld, you never get rid of the Dane.Kipling was talking about the Viking invasions of the 9th through 11th centuries, when England, weary of war, offered gold to Danish raiders in exchange for peace. The Danes accepted the payment—and came back for more. More gold, more land, more power. Each payment only proved England’s weakness and fed the invader’s appetite.

Fast forward a thousand years, and we are doing it again. Only now the Danes wear quarter-zips. They drive high end SUVs. They don’t burn villages — they list them on Airbnb. We are once again paying tribute. But this time, the Dane is your landlord.

The modern rentier is no different from the Viking in his longboat. He produces nothing, builds nothing, contributes nothing. He takes — month after month, year after year — simply for the sin of owning what others need to live. Shelter is not a luxury. It is not a status symbol. It is not an “opportunity.” It is a biological requirement, a baseline for dignity. Yet in America, we have made it an asset class — a slot machine — a blood sport.

And it is not just the mega-landlords and real estate trusts. It’s your neighbor. Your coworker. Your cousin who “got smart” and bought a duplex. We have trained a generation to believe that prosperity means turning other people’s needs into your passive income. It’s a mad scramble for loot. A zero-sum game where someone must lose in order for someone else to “win.” And the losses are mounting.

According to Zillow’s 2024 Rent Affordability Report, rents in the United States rose 30.4% from 2019 to 2024. Half of renters now spend more than 30% of their income on rent. One-third of Millennials and Gen Z adults live with their parents, unable to afford shelter. We are becoming a nation of permanent tenants.And what is worse — we are becoming a nation of petty kings, each trying to stake out our own fiefdom. This is not the American dream. It is a return to serfdom — where those who do the work live at the mercy of those who merely own.

This is not an attack on investing. There is a world of difference between value creation and value extraction. A financial advisor, a stockbroker, a small business investor — these are people who operate in mutual markets, where value is built and shared. Their work, when done ethically, is tied to the success of their clients, their communities, their portfolios. This is not parasitism — this is stewardship.But landlords? They are not in the business of helping you succeed. They are in the business of charging you more for something you cannot do without — and punishing you if you cannot pay. Rent is not a service. It is a tollbooth. And the Dane is collecting.

Kipling’s lesson was not just historical — it was prophetic. Appeasement does not stop conquest. It feeds it. And we, as a society, are feeding the worst of ourselves — the hoarder, the leech, the absentee king. We are teaching our children that the best way to succeed is to own what others need and never let them forget it. This logic of extraction isn’t confined to rent. It infects every layer of our economy. We see it in insurance — an industry that was once about shared risk and mutual protection, now mutated into a cash pipeline for executives and shareholders. The average American pays thousands of dollars a year for health, auto, home, and life insurance — and in return, they get fine print, denied claims, and phone trees.

The CEO of UnitedHealth made over $20 million last year. Cigna’s chief made $31 million. Anthem’s? Over $20 million. That money doesn’t come from innovation. It comes from you — from premiums collected, from claims denied, from lives managed like spreadsheets. We don’t need billionaires managing our risk. We don’t need middlemen skimming a percentage off the top of our fear. This isn’t protection. It’s tribute. It’s modern Danegeld.

And insurance is only one tentacle of the beast. We see it in software subscriptions, where tools that once came with a one-time cost are now rented month after month. We see it in education, where student loans fund bloated bureaucracies and six-figure salaries for vice presidents of nothing. And we see it most clearly in platform monopolies — the new digital landlords who charge a toll to exist in the marketplace of ideas, goods, and communication.

Amazon, for instance, takes 40 to 50 percent of a book’s cover price just for listing it. Not printing it. Not editing it. Not writing a single word. Simply for being the gate.
Apple skims 30% from developers who want to sell apps in its walled garden.
Google sells access to your own audience, profiting off ads it places in front of your work, your words, your customers.
Meta dictates what’s visible, when, and to whom — a tithe on your voice.

These companies didn’t invent the internet. They captured it.What once belonged to everyone — the digital commons — is now walled off and monetized. They own the shelf, the audience, the algorithm. They are toll collectors on roads we built with our content, our money, our time.

The pattern is clear: find something people need — and insert yourself between them and it. Then charge them forever.

It’s not enough to expose this. It must be abolished. Regulated. Broken apart. If a company earns billions by standing between people and their doctor, their home, or their audience — it is not a business, it’s a parasite.

We can build. We can share. We can return to the idea of a moral economy — where prosperity is not the product of someone else’s poverty. We can stop paying the Dane-geld.

But only if we’re willing to stop being Danes.