Question
How does lobbying work? Does lobbying equate to bribery?
Answer
Lobbying is not bribery for exactly the same reason cops or soldiers killing others in the course of their work is not murder.
In government by consent, via an implicit social contract, we let the representatives of the state have a monopoly over the legitimate practice of certain behaviors that are defined as criminal in ordinary citizens.
Government by consent is of course an abstract idea, and the implicit social contract is not really one you can refuse unless you are willing to live on a raft at sea. So most "consent" is pragmatic (because dissent is too costly), rather than based on values.
So by your private morality, you may still consider lobbying to be equivalent to bribery. I certainly do. The window dressing of due process, limits etc. is merely codification and systematization of the act of bribery, for the purposes of efficiency, with no change in the moral implications.
Of course, this conclusion should also make you re-examine your opinion of bribery itself. Is it fundamentally bad/evil? I grew up in the most corrupt state in a pretty corrupt country. I've done my share of bribing in my life, because I had to. Know what bothered me the most? Not the illegitimacy of it, but the inefficiency of it. I didn't like the furtive protocol and ambiguously coded negotiations. I didn't grudge the very ill-paid government servants making a few bucks on the side to supplement their income.
So standard corruption isn't actually that bad. It performs a necessary economic function in a financially weak state that cannot afford to pay its civil service enough for the work it does. It is a very inefficient way of performing that function, but the function itself is not immoral.
Where bribery differs from controlled lobbying is that it has the potential to occasionally sink to a much lower moral level. This does not mean it will actually happen. I've known corrupt institutions that are more inefficient than comparable non-corrupt ones, but no more venal. But I've also known of cases where there is a lowering of moral standards. This invariably happens when kinship structures are stronger than the state. It starts with small acts of nepotism and rent-seeking behavior and ends up with complete regulatory capture of the state by kinship interests. Why is this morally a much lower level? Because this kind of capture is what eventually leads to things like racism, ethnic cleansing and the like. In a country with two cultural groups X and Y, if group X does a complete capture of the police force via this mechanism, what do you think is going to happen?
Corporate regulatory capture is more familiar in America today, and seems awful, but trust me, it is waaay better than regulatory capture by kinship interests. Corporate regulatory capture is at least a sort of "equal opportunity for corruption" situation in the US. It was vaguely satisfying to me that the latest Wall Street scandal, involving Raj Rajaratnam, at least demonstrated equality of corruption opportunity with respect to south asians :). I'd be really worried if corruption very disproportionately involved (say) WASPy New England Mayflower-descended types.
In government by consent, via an implicit social contract, we let the representatives of the state have a monopoly over the legitimate practice of certain behaviors that are defined as criminal in ordinary citizens.
Government by consent is of course an abstract idea, and the implicit social contract is not really one you can refuse unless you are willing to live on a raft at sea. So most "consent" is pragmatic (because dissent is too costly), rather than based on values.
So by your private morality, you may still consider lobbying to be equivalent to bribery. I certainly do. The window dressing of due process, limits etc. is merely codification and systematization of the act of bribery, for the purposes of efficiency, with no change in the moral implications.
Of course, this conclusion should also make you re-examine your opinion of bribery itself. Is it fundamentally bad/evil? I grew up in the most corrupt state in a pretty corrupt country. I've done my share of bribing in my life, because I had to. Know what bothered me the most? Not the illegitimacy of it, but the inefficiency of it. I didn't like the furtive protocol and ambiguously coded negotiations. I didn't grudge the very ill-paid government servants making a few bucks on the side to supplement their income.
So standard corruption isn't actually that bad. It performs a necessary economic function in a financially weak state that cannot afford to pay its civil service enough for the work it does. It is a very inefficient way of performing that function, but the function itself is not immoral.
Where bribery differs from controlled lobbying is that it has the potential to occasionally sink to a much lower moral level. This does not mean it will actually happen. I've known corrupt institutions that are more inefficient than comparable non-corrupt ones, but no more venal. But I've also known of cases where there is a lowering of moral standards. This invariably happens when kinship structures are stronger than the state. It starts with small acts of nepotism and rent-seeking behavior and ends up with complete regulatory capture of the state by kinship interests. Why is this morally a much lower level? Because this kind of capture is what eventually leads to things like racism, ethnic cleansing and the like. In a country with two cultural groups X and Y, if group X does a complete capture of the police force via this mechanism, what do you think is going to happen?
Corporate regulatory capture is more familiar in America today, and seems awful, but trust me, it is waaay better than regulatory capture by kinship interests. Corporate regulatory capture is at least a sort of "equal opportunity for corruption" situation in the US. It was vaguely satisfying to me that the latest Wall Street scandal, involving Raj Rajaratnam, at least demonstrated equality of corruption opportunity with respect to south asians :). I'd be really worried if corruption very disproportionately involved (say) WASPy New England Mayflower-descended types.