3.5 billion dollars were spent on political lobbying in 2019 alone.
What’s more is that political donations funded presidential add campaigns that topped
14 billion dollars.
These astronomical sums are not reserved for the big leagues of federal politics either,
every year vast fortunes are spent influencing policy decisions from, the oval office and
federal congress all the way down to local city councils.
But why is this allowed?
Political lobbying combined with huge campaign contributions from wealthy individuals and
companies has started to seem tantamount to bribery, where the best interests of the voting
public are seconded to who can write the biggest donation cheque fundamentally undermining
democratic processes….
Right?
Well it’s time to defend the indefensible by learning how money works to influence politics
and why we should want it to stay like this.
Now before we get into the actual arguments in favor of pollical lobbying and campaign
contributions we need to get one thing out of the way.
That is that all of this is the law… the first amendment as discerned by the US supreme
court protects politicians and their supporters right to speak freely on political issues
and in support or opposition of political individuals, parties or ideas.
This right to free speech extends to using any legal means necessary to promote those
ideas as loudly as possible.
Now whether spending money really counts as a form of speech is still a bit contentious,
but hey I would like to think the supreme court is more qualified to make that decision
than you or I.
Setting all that aside lets explore why (constitutionally mandated or not), this whole process might
still be a really good thing.
So to get things started we need to make a distinction between political lobbying and
political donations, because they are two separate things.
Political Donations are pretty straight forward, it is the financial contributions paid to
a political party or candidate for them to use on their election or re-election campaigns.
Political Lobbying is a little bit different, it involves special interest groups operating
to actively sway the decision making process of a politician, a party or the entire government.
It sounds pretty nefarious on the surface, but think of it like this…
If you have ever attended something as simple as a town hall meeting, to voice your opinion
on what should happen to abandoned lot 48, well then you have engaged in political lobbying.
Political lobbying does not need to involve money at all and it normally doesn’t.
but
The larger special interest groups that take lobbying much more seriously will normally
be funded by large institutions or extremely wealthy individuals.
This money will be used for a few things.
It will normally be used to create some kind of awareness about the group, it will be used
to pay for office facilities and it will be used to pay the salaries of people that basically
turn complaining in a public forum into a full time job.
Of course this money can also be used for donations… now technically this can’t
be transactional, an agreement of something like $200,000 for a yes vote on an upcoming
bill would be illegal.
But that’s where that marketing from earlier comes in because lobbyists really walk this
rule right up to the line.
If a special interest lobbying group named Americans For Lower Taxes makes a contribution
to your political campaign and you later publicly vote to support new capital gains tax legislation,
well it should be pretty obvious to you that you aren’t getting anymore donations from
them in the future, and chances are they will probably fund your opponent instead… good
luck.
The types of people that can afford to fund these organisations tend to have different
objectives from the common man, and sometimes those objectives would even be at odds with
what the majority might want.
So obviously this is a pretty gross misuse of financial dominance to subvert the outcome
of the democratic process, right?
Well not necessarily.
For starters a good chunk of this money still does come from regular people but more so
than that, these organisations are actually limited in HOW they can make these donations.
Right of the bat federal law does not allow corporations to donate money directly to political
candidates so they need to find alternatives.
So what they do instead is use what is known as “soft money”
These institutions will pay to have a presence in Washington and a working personal relationship
with lawmakers through their agents.
These agents can work as experts on certain issues and even draft legislation for lawmakers
to put before congress.
Again this might sound bad but in reality our political system relies on these agents
to operate effectively.
I don’t know if you have noticed but a lot of lawmakers are f s.
A majority of them are ex lawyers at best, or cranky old businessmen looking for something
to do in retirement at worst.
Imagine if you put the issue of something like “encrypted data collection” in front
of your grandparents to debate over and you might start to see the issue.
Sometimes these guys have no idea what they are legislating.
For what it’s worth that’s fine, it’s impossible to expect all lawmakers to be experts
on all things which is why they are free to ask for help.
A political lobbyist from the tech space will be able to explain in depth the ramifications
of a proposed piece of legislation.
They will also be able to speak about this using the kind of legalese jargon that only
lawmakers, lawyers and judges really understand but is still important for creating robust
legislation.
Of course these lobbyists are paid by tech companies so they will always try to spin
any proposal in favour of the tech companies they represent but lawmakers know this, and
a good ongoing relationship requires a bit of honesty from these lobbyist otherwise the
politicians aren’t going to ask for their help anymore.
Now you might say well why don’t we just pay to have public experts advise politicians
in order to take out the special interests of these pieces of advice?
Well you might be able to guess it, that would be really expensive, people that are qualified
enough to speak with confidence on the legislative process while also being experts on topics
ranging from technology to medical research, all the way up to environmental sustainability
attract fat salaries.
You would also need lot’s of them, because not all of them are going to be experts on
all issues.
You would also need enough to go around between all of the lawmakers considering an important
issue.
It’s just not feasible…
But perhaps this is all skirting around the main issue.
As hard as I try to defend it, there are loopholes in place that allows massive piles of money
to flow into election campaigns that are costing more money than most peoples entire extended
family will see in 100 lifetimes.
Ok but consider the alternatives.
There ARE a few options here
State funded election campaigns
Exclusively self-funded campaigns
Or no funding allowed at all…
Lets start with that last one.
Some groups have floated the idea of eliminating campaign funding all together.
Instead candidates would be invited to attend a series of public forums where they could
debate issues and that would be the extent of the process.
The problem here is that it disproportionally favours incumbent lawmakers because they will
be the person that people know.
By the same logic it also favours people who have a strong public image outside of politics,
eg celebrities, and if there is one thing we don’t need it is more celebrities in
politics.
It also doesn’t necessarily stop someone else with a big audience swinging the result
of an election.
Think of someone like Casey Neistat who made two videos supporting Hillary Clinton and
Joe Biden in their respective presidential elections.
He was well within his rights to do this of course (first amendment and all that good
stuff)… but he could get that message out to millions of potentially undecided voters,
and if the actual politicians didn’t have a platform to share their counter argument,
well then politics would quickly turn into a game of who has the most famous friends.
Well ok, what if instead the government gave these candidates a budget that they could
spend anyway they liked on promoting their campaign.
Sure it might cost taxpayer dollars but maybe that is worth it to get corporate influence
out of politics.
The problem is, how do you distribute this money?
You could distribute it to parties based on the seats they currently hold in government,
but this can cause drastic and irreversible chain reactions that favour one party over
another.
If one part has a really good election cycle they would get more money in the next election
and likely win more seats which would give them more money in the election after and
so on until they control the entire government.
The other alternative is just to give money to every candidate, but this causes other
issue, mostly people just running for office to get money from the government.
Now some states actually run what are called “clean elections” which is basically what
has been described here, and this problem of non-serious competitors is a really big
deal.
If this became widespread enough people could just make it their full-time job to run for
every election out there and secure themselves some campaign funding.
Now you might say this sound simple to solve, just throw these fraudulent candidates in
jail, and yeah sure I suppose that could work, buuuuttt no great government in history relied
on throwing political candidates in prison in order to run proper elections.
Alright alright, what about only allowing self-funded election campaigns.
Well this is the worst solution of the bunch, this is how you get nothing but billionaires
being president, because they are the only ones that can afford to pay for all the tv
ads, rallies and public appearances across the country.
The current system of political lobbying is far from perfect, and yes there do look to
be some policy decisions made in the past that work more to secure political funding
more so than acting in the best interests of the public, but as the great Winston Churchill
once said, it’s the worst system of government, except for all of the alternatives.
… This was the second video in our series of defending industries that look to be indefensible,
if you enjoyed this topic go watch the first video in this series which defended the multi-level
marketing industry and explored how they have managed to avoid being classed as pyramid
schemes, despite clearly being pyramid schemes.
And as always please consider liking and subscribing to keep on learning How Money Works.