Lobbyists are people who tell officials whatever they are paid to say. Each individual lobbyist is presumably useful to the person paying them. But that doesn't mean that they are societally useful. If we had exactly zero of them, legislators would still learn things and pass laws. They might need to hire more researchers. Or they might not, because there'd be less distortion to sort through.

The reason company X needs a lobbyist is often because company Y has a lobbyist. That's certainly why Google and the tech industry started spending heavily; they were losing out to other players. It's basically an arms race to manipulate government. With the additional problem that the battleground is our own country, so that the harm caused by the ongoing war is not borne by lobbyists but by taxpayers and citizens.

> Lobbyists are people who tell officials whatever they are paid to say

Lobbyists are paid to advocate the viewpoints of their clients, but their clients are people: businesses, organizations, and individuals with a stake in the society.

> If we had exactly zero of them, legislators would still learn things and pass laws. They might need to hire more researchers.

Sure, you can move that function into the bureaucracy. Instead of lobbyists presenting information on behalf of clients, you could have technocrats that were part of the bureaucracy. But someone has to present to the legislators the impact a proposal will have on various stakeholders--it would be a bad thing if nobody did that work.

And it's not clear that moving the research function into the bureaucracy would be a good thing. The benefit of the lobbying system is that it's adversarial--Google's lobbyists can attack the evidence and reasoning of Sony's lobbyists. But who attacks the evidence of the faceless unelected technocrat? Non-adversarial processes have failure modes too.

Also, it's not like without lobbyists big corporations wouldn't have influence over government, or even less influence. Companies like mass retailers, oil companies, coal companies, etc, will always have tremendous pull because they employ lots of people or control products vital to the economy. Companies like Google merely have money, rather than hundreds of thousands of voters' livelihoods as bargaining chips. It's a huge credit of the lobbying system that such companies can have as much influence over government as they do.

> their clients are people: businesses, organizations, and individuals with a stake in the society.

Protip: no matter what Romney says, corporations are not people. Having started a number of companies, and having also met a few people, I am quite sure they are different. Only one of them is supposed to be running the government.

> But someone has to present to the legislators the impact a proposal will have on various stakeholders

If only there were some organization that could do that. Maybe we could call it the Congressional Budget Office or the Congressional Research Service. Maybe legislators could have aides who specialize in particular areas. Or heck, maybe our legislators could find some way to hear what knowledgeable people say. Like they could invite experts to come by and hear what they have to say. We could call it a hear-ing.

> But who attacks the evidence of the faceless unelected technocrat?

Everybody. Which is basically what happens now. Also, I am no expert, but I am pretty sure that most legislative aides and researchers have faces.

>Companies like Google merely have money [...] It's a huge credit of the lobbying system that such companies can have as much influence over government as they do.

Absolutely. Thank god money can have incredible influence. Lord knows what would happen if the power were actually held by the people. Cats and dogs sleeping together, I'm sure. It'd be anarchy.