Today I came across an article about some guy who wants to get money out of politics. Up until I read this article, I had thought that I was against politicians receiving donations to their campaigns or otherwise being 'bribed' by lobbyists. But there is one key sentence in the aforementioned article that changed my mind: "if you get the influence of money out of politics, we will get people who will actually vote on their conscience."
I do not like the conscience of the average politician. They tend to be overly religious, under-educated in economics and all harder sciences, and completely ignorant of many other fields. We feel safe in saying that they would vote their conscience, but most of us, I think, would feel less certain in the claim that they would vote reasonably, or logically, or even sanely.
So if removing money doesn't obviously improve the quality of our politicians, we should take a look at the other side of the equation. What does money do for us? Well, you could write entire books on the subject, but basically, money votes for the benefit of large, stable, and successful organizations. Since these organizations have so much money, we can assume that they are 'good' for the economy, in that they have moved a lot of utility around and have a vested interest in things remaining is a state conductive to moving even more in the future.
Money may also vote for Ponzi schemes and accounting fraud and forms of money that are too abstract for their own good, so it is good that we carefully inspect the lobbyists. But the majority of money is going to be trying its darnest to support a stable and growing industry; whatever you may think of large corporations, they are an excellent backbone to build a growing economy around, and a growing economy is good for just about any agenda you may have, unless you are a hardcore hippy or are waiting for the rapture.
In many cases money does resist the optimal outcome, simply because money is under our control and we are immensely sub-optimal. For example, most people do not like factory farms, BUT are unwilling to pay for more ethically raised meat. Every major (and minor) producer of meat would be happy to raise organic free-range locally-produced highly-educated and not-killed-until-a-ripe-old-age meat, as long as we pay for it. If we want ethically-raised animals, that just gives something concrete for meat producers to advertise and charge for. Meat producers love concrete things to charge for! This goes for every company, of every sort. A recent concrete example is the auto industry, which was bullish on SUVs and Hummers not too long ago, and is now happy to find that customers are willing to pay good prices for good gas mileage. (There were, after all, only so many more model years that it would have been feasible to come out with bigger cars, but gas mileage can improve for decades yet! And shipping costs are lower.)
The lobbying these companies do is largely a negotiation with other interest groups to determine the rate of change in federal regulations and funding. Large companies are not big fans of making changes that are not requested by their customers, and it is worth some money to them to keep their options open.
Of course, there are other considerations, such as setting tax rates and levels of protectionism in which we do want to be balanced; if every lobbyist has equal entry into the bribe market, these issues would be self-solving. Sadly, the US (in a prolonged fit of insanity) strongly discourages lobbying by foreign companies, and has slapdash methods of discouraging lobbying by other foreign interest groups. For reasons unclear, the main lobbyists for a reasonable distribution of taxes are our elected officials... ...and the less said about that the better.If we ever decide that conscience should be our guide, the logical thing to do is to aid specialists in that field to lobby better -- perhaps by giving them a lot of money. Of course, that goes right back to the original problem, as most Americans do not choose 'conscience experts' that I trust.
