The only solution is to take power out of the hands of politicians.
Get rid of K Street and something worse will take its place.
Get rid of Congresses ability to regulate every detail of the economy and K Street will have a lot less to lobby for.
Get rid of K Street and something worse will take its place.
Get rid of Congresses ability to regulate every detail of the economy and K Street will have a lot less to lobby for.
I sometimes wonder if the problem isn't one of having too much accountability. If terms were twice as long then politicians could spend half as much time campaigning and wouldn't have to take as much money from private interests to stay in office. If federal senators went back to being appointed by the state legislatures there would be less voting but there would also be less unwarranted federal interference in state affairs. And so on.
And the military? Well, sure there are issues there. We can all agree on that.
Now, the military and environmental regulation are inextricably linked to the economy, no doubt about that. And their impact on the economy can be large, no doubt about that either. But there is so much which the government gets involved with - and where there is SO much money to be made via lobbying and influence peddling - which the government really doesn't need to be involved in.
I guess I'm saying that if the EPA and military corruption were the only issues we had to deal with, we'd be in a much better space than we are now.
There are certainly things currently done by the feds that could be reasonably handed over to the states. Social security comes to mind as a big one. But social spending is hardly the area where moving that out of Washington would make the largest dent in K Street.
Copyright is certainly a popular issue here on HN, and I'm sure K Street makes a lot of money on it, but again it's like the EPA - something which the government has to by definition regulate in some way.
In fact, moving Social Security and Obamacare subsidies to the states would probably put a larger dent in K Street than all of the other issues you've mentioned combined (military, EPA, copyright, antitrust). You're talking about trillions in handouts, issues which impact every single citizen, massive bureaucracies fighting for power.