Serious question: Is it possible for society to criminalize rent seeking behaviors like this? It seems clear that there's no benefit to keeping the status quo tax filing system except for the benefit of tax preparers. What's stopping the US from creating a law that says if a company attempts to lobby for something in bad faith (like the tax example), they will face sanction?
Fair question and I dislike this sort of thing as much as anyone. And of course such an opening comment means there is a "but..." coming.
What you're asking for is to criminalize certain petitions of government. So how do you choose whom to discriminate against such that they cannot petition their government in regards to law making without, at the same time, simply institutionalizing the viewpoints of the other side? Maybe we shutdown corporate lobbying, but then do you need to shut down other associations of individuals (consumer groups, unions, etc) from lobbying government in order to keep equity, or tacitly assume those other organizations must be right anyway? There are many ways to play that game and the only options are those that simply favor one interest group over another... sure, the winning side probably won't complain about undue influence or insensitivity to the concerns of the losing side... but when has it ever been that way?
If you want a real solution to problem you're talking about without explicitly shutting down the give and take of ideas (good and bad) that are required to make the democratic aspects of our system function, your only solution is to limit what power the government has to influence preferential outcomes for anyone that would lobby it and increase the rights of individuals to act on their own accord or in trade with other, similarly free individuals. Without the power to deeply intrude into the economic lives of people (regardless if employee or shareholder), lobbying government for favors simply wouldn't be a good investment. Indeed, it is ironic that you ask to outlaw this sort of thing... because any time you expand the government power to regulate or influence outcomes you make the lobbying dollars just that much more worthwhile. Going further, you simply are considering a totalitarian systematization of your ideas: something worse than the rent seeking you rightfully decry.
I think "only solution" is far too strong. It seems to me there are two sorts of lobbying: positive sum informing of legislators, and zero/negative sum jockeying for societal advantage. We want to keep the former and minimize the latter.
So my proposal is:
1. Make all paid lobbying illegal. Make corporate donations to candidates, campaigns, and parties illegal. Eliminate revolving doors. Strongly limit individual donations. (And, while we're at it, maybe add federal funding of elections with spending caps.)
2. Industry groups, consumer groups, and the like can exist and publish what they want on their websites, but may not have private contact with legislators, their staffs, etc.
3. Legislators can communicate with outside groups to request information, opinions, and the like, but all requests and responses must be published in a permanently maintained record.
4. We increase the budget for congressional staffing and for neutral research groups like the CBO, so legislators have the resources necessary to make good law without having to lean on paid lobbyists.
I'm sure there are plenty of other proposals that could be made as well. The flow of ideas isn't the problem. It's the flow of money and power.
Regulatory capture is a problem, but I think you'd have much worse problems regulating complex industries without talking to them.
For example, the FCC doesn't really exist to protect consumers from anyone, but to be the "traffic cop" protecting manufacturers and operators of radio equipment from each other. I have a hard time believing the FCC could make coherent rules and spectrum allocations without the affected parties being able to raise issues to it.
Ditto, for example, airlines and pilot unions being unable to raise concerns to the FAA.
Ideally, lobbying is a way to say:
"Hey! We do this thing you want to ban [guns | amateur radio | general aviation | take your pick], and here's why, and by the way, we vote."
"Hey! We have this serious problem in our industry, one of our peers is behaving badly, can we do something about this?" Net neutrality regulation, for example, comes from companies like Netflix advocating for their interests against companies like Comcast.
You can publish this on the web all you want, but Congressmen aren't going to read the whole internet every day. We need some kind of "push" mechanism to get issues in front of them.
Obviously there are many very serious failure modes, particularly when one side of an issue has a disproportionate budget compared to the other. But there are also important use-cases.
Lobbying is not so simple an evil. Lobbying backed by campaign contributions, on the other hand, is much more simply bribery.
I didn't say nobody could talk to industry. See points 2-4.
If, e.g., the FCC believes they need input, they can ask. I expect that regulators would get in the habit of requesting quite a bit of information on a regular basis.
If trade associations would like to get Congress to attend to an important issue, they can call up a newspaper reporter and try to interest them in an article. And note that there's nothing stopping an individual citizen from calling up a representative and saying, "I'm an airline pilot, and I am concerned about urgent issue X!"
Lobbying is an arms race. The best solutions to arms races is to limit to the lowest sustainable level. And it's important to note that lobbyists are not just competing with other lobbyists. They're competing with everybody who can't hire a professional lobbyist. That is, the majority of America.
I am writing a second reply to you because this is a new thought and only something I just remembered which seems to not be covered by your proposal.
I was involved with a startup in the past several years where one of the people in the startup had a relative that was an official in a federal bureaucracy. The startup was in an area which was tangential to the regulatory authority of that bureaucracy, but relied on third parties which definitely were under that authority. The relative, it was reported, made it clear that if we thought that the third parties were acting in a less than compliant fashion towards us, thus hindering us, we should let them know so they could make it right. I expect our colleague made a bigger deal of how connected they were with us than may have been warranted, but the implication was clear: I'm connected and can pull strings if someone gets in our way.
Now of course a company reporting a regulatory problem they're having with another company isn't underhanded, no matter the connections... but I have a hunch that having the contact within the establishment would have helped that claim move up in the line or be taken more seriously than a claim coming in without the proper introductions (if you will). I don't expect the relative gave our colleague the yellow-pages number (yeah, I'm old) to make such a report, just in case, if you know what I mean.
But the key here is that this didn't even involve a politician. Rent-seeking in a highly regulated environment doesn't even have to come through the politicians. It can be made through the appointed and career officials that create and enforce the regulations mandated by legislators. This is especially true today when so much of law is simply and vaguely mandating the creation of categories of regulation rather than actually specifying what is law and what it is not.
Yeah, regulation is another thing entirely from legislation.
I think US regulators are much less of an issue than US legislators, in that normal government employees know that they are not supposed to take money from the companies they regulate. I'm sure it happens, but I think we already have decent mechanisms in place to handle that sort of corruption. And if they turned out to be insufficient, the way we'd fix that is through legislation, so I'd still want to focus on that for now.
1) You make corporate political donations illegal, but that's pretty specific to a single class of interest group. What about those that regularly act in opposition to corporate interests, such as unions, environment groups, consumer groups? Your point 2 seems to imply they would be included, but why are you specific here as to the prohibition? Or do you propose to treat different association of people preferentially and on what basis?
2) Again you're specific to certain kinds of interest groups but this time leave out corporations when granting permissions. Again, do you have favored classes of associations of people?
3) How do you police such a thing? How do police communication through surrogates or the thousand other ways creative individuals seeking rent or hoping for regulatory capture will bypass "communications with the outside"? Isn't this the sort of creative thinking that caused problems with McCain/Feingold and the like? If you accept greater regulatory involvement from the state, the greater the rewards to those that can gain the ear of the regulator. Risk/reward continues to skew to creative evasion.
4) What makes a neutral group neutral, and, in some way, can there ever be such a thing? Don't get me wrong, I don't know of any instances of the CBO outright gaming information, or releases, etc. for clearly political purposes (nor have I studied the question). However, CBO Director is still appointed by the politicians. What if one political interest group captures congress and decides to politicize the CBO since they can't get sufficient outside support for their position under your proposal? Do you politicians like Trump would do such a thing? Even if we put those sort of hand-wavy humans-are-humans arguments aside, elected politicians are ultimately beholden to their constituents regardless of the CBO position; CBO says we spend recklessly on the military (or if then that sort of thing) a big military district politician will very much ignore that advice. I expect your funds for increased staffers results simply in increased "independent" research supporting whatever position a given politician wants to hold for whatever reason.
Unfortunately, I still think I'm on the right track and that just about any solution that doesn't somehow require the political class, their staff, and families to be quarantined into some forced monasterial existence cutoff from the outside world, seems corruptible.
1: I'm flexible. Corporate donations are the most problematic, in that they create a feedback loop. If I can lobby for a thing that gets me money, I can use some of the profits to buy more favorable legislation. But I'd be happy with pure public funding of elections, no donations allowed. Or an individuals-only model, where each person has a strong limit, like $250.
2: I left out for-profit corporations on purpose, but I'm sure there's a reasonable case for including them.
3: The same way we police campaign finance, lobbying, public records, and elected official ethics. That is, a variety of groups with investigative power who do their best to root out offenders. You couldn't eliminate everything, but as long as we got the bulk of it and reduced the financial incentives for elected officials to favor donors, I expect we'd do pretty well.
4: In this case by neutral I mean "paid by the government to serve the legislators". Sure, there are risks. But giving legislators their own well-funded research groups means they'll have to lean less on industry-created "facts".
Everything is of course corruptible, but perfection isn't my goal. We're already much less corrupt than most other countries [1], and I'm suggesting that we could do better by limiting or strictly controlling channels of information and money. Those old channels made more sense when we didn't all carry around all the world's opinions and information in our pockets.
Both sides of this thread have suggested actions, albeit competing actions. Rational discussion of competing ideas involves discussing the positives, negatives, motivating ideals, and the validity of the ideas on the table. Not discussing or raising issues evades reality and doesn't do anything to diffuse or give answer to that reality. Simply put, if we're going to do something I rather do it with eyes wide open, understanding the downsides, rather than mimic one of those "hold my beer..." memes.
And... notwithstanding the debate at hand, perhaps we shouldn't act if acting actually makes matters worse or drives bad behavior further underground. Significant thought in the climate change debate and the environmental movements is spent on thinking up all the bad things that will happen if we continue to act as an industrial society. Is your admonishment for them, or do you pick and choose who can argue as is convenient? One might say... that's my problem with the person whose proposal I was responding to... they seemed to want to pick and chose who could say what and when.
Proving bad faith for lobbying is impossible. TurboTax would argue that the simple filing would allow the government to stiff citizens by not taking full advantage of their potential tax credits, etc... Proving bad faith would require fraud, and I don't see how there is any indication here of that.
Absolutely. What few people realize is that nations are competing with each other and this is a perfect example of how you can differentiate.
However, your options may be limited at present, or you may have "roots" where you are. If I was founding a nation on the water with Peter Thiel, or in space with Elon Musk, you can bet I would advertise quite loudly that this (and for example pharmaceutical price gouging) would be criminalized.
Today, well, put your votes into people who support it and/or be willing to relocate towards those politicians.
I think that's a pipe dream. I once read that true freedom is the freedom to choose where to live, but our world is moving towards closing borders even more, and they were never really open. So I don't think nations compete on that front. Internally local people compete for the ruling opportunity, nations don't compete to attract citizens.
Sorry I was vague in my comment . You will have it on the books and the lawmakers can point to it when they get elected . Other than that the behavior that you want won't be prevented . At best you will have some long drawn out court case that will strike down the law .
The fun thing is that the way our current economy works only encourages this kind of thing, with for example retirement funds depending on stock prices to go up. My favorite is Medicare and drug prices, with Medicare drugs often funded by budget deficits that increase the money supply.
