In Defense of Lobbyists

infovegan.com

4 points·cjoh··4 comments

The problem isn't lobbying. The problem is that by offering them lucrative jobs, politicians and their staff can be captured by particular special interests and wielded as unfair advantages in public policy debates.

"Since lobbying is a profession and not a person, it can be neither good nor bad" is almost as absurd as saying "Since nuclear weapons are a tool and not a weapon, it can be neither good nor bad".

I'd argue that, yes, nuclear weapons are inanimate objects, cannot think and therefore cannot possess the concepts of good or evil.

A better way to argue this would be to say "murdering" is a profession and can be neither good nor bad. Sure. Fine, granted, murdering is evil but it's also a loaded term.

You may make an otherwise excellent case that lobbying is not intrinsically evil. Without judging that one way or the other, I will say that the sentence the grand-parent complained about bothered me too. It smacks of self-satisfied logic chopping, but it's complete bunk. If we can assume that some professions essentially require evil acts of people in the profession, then it's pretty natural (and reasonable) to call the profession evil. Again - whether or not lobbying falls into that category is not my concern.

For me the bottom line is that you don't even need that claim. You could have simply started the paragraph by saying that we shouldn't be too quick to generalize about lobbyists, since blah blah blah.

(Off-topic, but there's an odd typo in the first sentence of the piece: "Last weekend Eric Schmidt state’d the obvious." You don't want that apostrophe.)

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