What positive role do lobbyists play in government? Why aren’t they just straight up illegal everywhere?
There was recently a law passed by the lower house (Bundestag) in Germany, reflecting EU law, that ride-on lawn-mowers and other low-speed vehicles needed to be insured when on public land. This law failed in the upper house (Bundesrat), and no reconciliation between the two was possible, so the law has ultimately failed to be implemented.
Maybe not the only cause for the upper-house to reject the law, but insurance companies - i.e. the people who would benefit from providing this insurance - were actually against this law, and fought against it. I believe their argument was that it would be too expensive to roll-out, and there was an alternative fund which would be better used to provide for the very rare occasions when an insurance payout occurred.
[I've used lower/upper house terminology, it's a little bit more complicated than that, and can't be directly mapped to the US/UK/AU system, but hopefully that expresses the idea of what happened]
For example, some representatives may have a general political position that they want to protect local industry from overseas competition with worse standards. There is a valuable role for a lobbyist to come and say "hey, you have taken measures for the steel industry and honey imports, but what about us, the widget industry as represented by ACME inc. also is relevant your goals!" - and if the representative agrees that this should be done, it makes sense for them to ask the lobbyist / the industry to make an exact proposal to how different types of widgets should be defined/distinguished in that new law, instead of having it be written by some staff paralegal who doesn't understand what the industry is about and what those terms mean.
A lobbyist's literal job is "to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
all as part of a renegiotiation of what "the public" actually means given that we have now digital internet, which forces a re-evaluation of what it evens means to "be in public"
it's like there's two publics: digital (or cyber or virtual) and physical (in real world), but our laws are not aware of this??? dunno
The bigger your company gets the more money you are able to put into lobbying and the more this distorts the democratic process. Big Business, especially Big Tech, is damaging our democracies beyond recognition.
This is why this barring of Amazon by the EC is to be welcomed.
I'm not keen on lobbyists drafting legislation. It saves the civil service effort and money, sure; but if the civil service don't have the competence to do the drafting themselves, who's going to review the draft?
Seriously so, why would you priorotize some potential future business over an existing one? To pamper founders?
1. You and your friends hire that lobbyist with your private funds.
2. The corporation as an entity hires the lobbyist.
They’re saying the second should be illegal and it’s unclear how your personal rights are impacted by that.
It’s really no different than a company defending itself in court. A legislative or regulatory proposal can be just as confiscatory or punitive, or have as many unexpected consequences, as a lawsuit. In both cases, the business needs to lawyer up and represent its interests.
You've just admitted the reason why you shouldn't be allowed to lobby as such—as I said earlier, your joint effort represents an unfair power advantage over other individual citizens.
Proof is in the pudding, take a good look at our fucked democracies.
The solution isn’t limits on people’s rights to debate and to advocate for their interests, it’s limits on the power of the thousands of elected rats running around DC and state capitals and city councils. We need less politics which means more centralization in the federal government and more power for the President.
Corporations are not a diffusion of their workers' voices, they're a diffusion of whoever owns 51% of stock - maybe even just one person.
There is a fundamental asymmetry between rich and poor people that is a real problem and that we don't really have a comprehensive solution for. But banning poor people from pooling resources together to get someone to talk on their behalf is not a step up; it's moving in the opposite direction.
Those small, diffuse shareholders aren’t typically represented by the board or executives, who are substantially controlled by a minority cabal. Do you think people with DIS in their retirement funds are happy Iger burned half the value on his politicking? — no, only his weirdo financier friends are. So why should we allow them to confiscate more assets from those small, diffuse shareholders to advocate their private politics and interests to the government?
If small, diffuse shareholders want to lobby Congress, they can do so individually as well, eg with a letter writing campaign or at public events.
A company has no interest in swaying the government, which represents the interests of the public. If the public (not the corporation) has concerns, they can privately advocate for those.
Would you stand by this statement when the corporation is caught doing some illegal evil thing, like denying employers their rights, or damaging the environment? Even if you would, most shareholders of large corporations don't. They suddenly discover being a shareholder is a very "at arms length" thing.
Might work nicely if corporations were "the embodiment" at all times, or at no times. But selectively, it is quite bad.
Like parts of the EU's AI act and Cybersecurity act are terrible for FOSS and small start-ups. It'd be like if compilers had been regulated as dangerous, and GCC stopped to hand Intel a monopoly in the 80s.
The bureaucrats often get it wrong, and are led astray (or bribed) by companies seeking regulatory capture (e.g. OpenAI and Microsoft).
But in practice the biggest corporations have the most resources and lawyers, so it just serves as another means of pushing regulatory capture.
Add the Unified Patent Court to the list.
Software patents through the backdoor, the President of the Court is already showing some love for EPO's practice, which they failed to copy/paste into law in 2002/2005.
They have become pay to play by years and years of corruption and bribery.
Has it ever been different? I remember seeing texts from the 70s or 80s where the thesis was that regulation is either lobbied for by industry (and thus serving it) or created in complete ignorance of the actual situation in the industry (which usually also benefits industry, because in a market economy other people's ignorance is usually profitable).
It's lazy politics. In the US where money is a driver for individuals (because campaigns paid with personal "campaign funds" are a big thing) it's even worse. There you could have people who owe business favors on day 1, because that's how they got their seat to begin with and if they want to keep they better fulfil their promises.
Last company, megacorp, has a full-time guy in Brussels who does regulatory intelligence and represents the company in the legislative process.
I think EU MDR, the 2017 European medical device regulation, indicates there is probably some value in having meaningful input from the giant corporations in the relevant sector being regulated. The burden on med device manufacturers to get market access to the EU has become very high - the enforcement date of the regulation has been pushed back year after year because it's taking forever for companies to overhaul their technical documentation for this regulation (no grandfathering clause, everything state of the art), and taking forever to get review by notified bodies (not enough notified bodies, TON to review for every device family).
The result is that there are just fewer devices on the market. Companies are looking at their volumes vs the effort EU wants to maintain market access for something that's been available since 1985 and the choice is an obvious nope.
It seems like the regulation was created in a bit of a bubble. Perhaps if there were more stakeholders at the table who could say "Um this is a ridiculous hurdle and I'm going to drop from the market if you implement this" or "We don't want to be a notified for body EU MDR, the burden is just too high and costs don't work out"... maybe we wouldn't be in this absolute fi-esta.
(Source on market availability - https://www.medtecheurope.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/med...)