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Comment by paytonjjones | Hacker News Reader

Alternatively, couldn't this be seen as evidence on favor of the "corporate narrative" on lobbying? Namely, that the purpose of lobbying is to ensure politicians have instant and easy access to high-quality, insider information relevant to their decision-making on corporate issues (as opposed to simply being bribed)?

I remember my poli sci teacher on college tried very hard to convince the class of this (with little success).

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I have a family member who's a lobbyist. When he talks about his job, a common theme is that a huge amount of his work is trying assess the impacts of policy on businesses (albeit mainly big businesses) and make sure lawmakers are able to take that into consideration. I don't know how well that represents lobbying as a whole, but that part always made sense and didn't seem like a bribe.

Several million dollars, as mentioned in the article, could easily be the cost of paying, e.g., 20 people to perform and communicate an assessment, as opposed to a direct "donation" to a politician. It's not said where that money was spent.

My ex worked at Congress for a few years so I got a little bit of view on the inside. There are a lot of lobbyists who do honest work and try to present correct data. Same for politicians. A lot of them (most?) really want to do a good job and make the country better. But, like in corporations, it's the psychopaths that only care for their own benefit and nothing else, who make it to the top and get to make the big decisions.

My ex was around when they worked on Obamacare. There were a lot of really good ideas floating around that had broad buy-in but then the super partisans and corrupt (say Lieberman and Baucus) destroyed it and created a big, but profitable for some, mess.

And with the increased spending after Citizens United it's only going to get worse.

I never understood that narrative either. You won't get high quality information from someone that is paying you for influence. You will get a lopsided/biased perspective, and the unwritten expectation is you will use it or contributions will cease.

Congress can and does ask companies for their expertise/stance on any given issue or policy, for free. They want to be involved for the same reason they lobby.

The same could be said about the judicial system though, right? Both the prosecution and defense are paid to influence the judge, and will naturally provide a biased perspective. But that doesn't mean there's not high quality information within.

I don't think biased information is a total dead end, but the onus is just on judges and politicians to tease out information from more than one angle. And often they don't.

It's up to the congressman to weight all evidence and data available and come to well informed conclusion. If they are incapable or unwilling to do that that's a different issue.

> Congress can and does ask companies for their expertise/stance

They are inherently incapable of identify all these companies or measure the impact of their policies on their own, though (which is perfectly understandable, well I guess these days they can use an LLM to make this easier... /s)

Reminds me of the time Tony Blair left office and went to work for JP Morgan Chase.

https://www.forbes.com/2008/01/10/jpmorgan-consultancy-advis...

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