Robert Reich on why corporations now spend so much money to lobby the government:
The real reason is the structural shift in the economy, beginning in the late 1970s, toward far more intense competition for consumers and investors. Globalization, deregulation, and technological advances — especially computers and the Internet — have been the driving forces. They have shifted almost all industries in almost all rich economies from being organized around stable oligopolies, in which competitive advantage derived mostly from economies of scale, toward far more intense competition in which competitive advantage comes from innovation — and from favorable treatment by government.
The fights that actually preoccupy Congress day by day, which consume weeks or months of congressional staffers’ time and which are often the most hotly contested by squadrons of Washington lobbyists and public-relations professionals, are typically contests between competing companies or competing sectors of an industry or, occasionally, competing industries. The result has been a clamor of business interests — a cacophony so loud as to almost drown out serious deliberation over the public good.
As I wrote last night, to play the game you need rules. Reich’s case is that the public are also in the game but are very bad at working the refs.