Seems to me Lobbying is like the rich kid paying the bully to beat everyone else up so long as the rich kid keeps playing. I stop and wonder how much less corruption there would be in the absence of our current lobby system.
There any good libertarian write-ups on this out there? I’m curious as to what you folks here have to say about lobbying in general.
It is unlibertarian. So is the “right to vote”. So is the “right to a Constitutional government”.
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Explain please. [:P]
Lobbying the government to tax or regulate someone else is just as wrong as a criminal boss telling his lackey to go rough up and rob some innocent person.
However, blanket lobbying restrictions would be just as wrong, because it would deny people the freedom to lobby against state criminality.
There is nothing wrong with a rich kid paying a bully to leave him alone, as long as he’s not positively paying the bully to attack others.
The thing you need to understand about lobbying is that it leads to welfare losses from a number of reasons. Gordon Tullock noted that where rent seeking has very concentrated costs and dispersed benefits it’s exceedingly hard for any group to counter-lobby due to the free rider problem. So essentially what you see is huge amounts of wealth transfers between various groups with nobody really “winning”.
The problem with this is that all of these groups then put money and time into investing in the necessary human and social capital. This leads to a situation in which the desires of consumers are being satisfied to a lesser extent than they would in the absence of rent seeking behaviour.
You guys summed it up well. Thanks!
Here’s a good example of “Distributed Costs and Concentrated Benefits”. Consider the taxi medallion licensing cartel in NYC.
There are a fixed number of taxi medallion licenses. They can be bought and sold. Recently, one traded for approximately $1M. There are approximately 13,000 medallion licenses.
The taxi medallion license holders own a State-backed monopoly/oligopoly worth approximately $13B.
The supply of taxi licenses is restricted. The net effect is that you can only get a taxi at the airport or in busy parts of Manhattan.
Occasionally, there is a proposal to increase the number of medallion licenses. The taxi medallion license holders, with a $13B State-backed cartel, can afford to spend a few million dollars lobbying against changing the law.
As an indvidiual, it doesn’t pay for me to spend money lobbying FOR more medallion licenses. Instead, I pay a couple of dollars more whenever I need a taxi, or I use another form of transportation.
There are are small handful of people who benefit from the taxi licensing cartel, the current medallion owners. Everyone else pays higher prices when they take a taxi, or a taxi is not available at all.
The medallion owners collect economic rent. Everyone else suffers.
The NYPD occasionally arrests someone for operating a taxi without a license. Due to lobbying by the medallion owners, a handful of police are dedicated to enforcing the cartel.
If the taxi medallion owners had to maintain their own private army of armed thugs to enforce their cartel, then it wouldn’t be profitable. Instead, this cost is externalized to the State.
This sort of thing occurs in EVERY industry. If you add them all up, it’s a huge increased cost and wasted resources.
I read this in Walter Blocks book. Pretty good stuff.
I think lobbying, applied correctly, is perfectly legitimate and useful for the freedom movement. First thing, though, is you don’t want to go to jail, so you don’t do anything blatantly illegal. You don’t want to ruin your movement’s reputation, and you don’t want your money to be wasted on some politician who doesn’t deserve it.
So I would suggest financially supporting non-partisan, single-issue organizations whose stances are parallel to your own. You want to support groups that are anti-tax, anti-war, pro-immigration, pro-drug-legallization, pro-gun-rights, anti-intellectual-property, anti-censorship, ad infinitum.
One of the things you do is you make sure that your lobbying dollar is spent wisely. You don’t want to donate money to a group that has no credibility, and no Washington connections. For example, if you have the choice between donating to “Veterans for Peace” and “Stoners Under The Age Of Twenty-Five For Peace”, I’m sure you can easily make the right choice.
Here are a few examples:
If I was rich, and I mean filthy rich, I would donate a million to every one of those organizations.