On the other hand, a legislator is elected by a large number of people, so in theory he has incentives to act on their behalf. But I'm sure lobbying can tip the scales a lot.
Maybe outright outlawing lobbying would help. Also, I think campaign donations and monetary influence should be extremely limited (to not make someone have too much influence *cough cough Elon Musk cough*), maybe to $100 or so. If lobbying is to be allowed, probably something like that should hold as well: each individual could give at most something like $100/yr to a special interest group, and those should be closely watched.
From wiki:
> Lobbying takes place at every level of government: federal, state, county, municipal, and local governments. In Washington, D.C., lobbyists usually target members of Congress, although there have been efforts to influence executive agency officials as well as Supreme Court appointees. Lobbying can have a strong influence on the political system; for example, a study in 2014 suggested that special interest lobbying enhanced the power of elite groups and was a factor shifting the nation's political structure toward an oligarchy in which average citizens have "little or no independent influence"
Campaign donations, per this website:
https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/candidate...
It seems individuals can total $132k "per account per year" (I assume there can be multiple accounts for different roles?). Even the $3500 per person per candidate per election seem a bit oversized to me.
Of course, legislators also have an incentive to allow lobbying to make their lives easier and earn all sorts of benefits, further complicating things.
It's really not clear to me lobby should exist at all. Like probably legislators could simply fund their own apparatus to understand the issues of their country/region in an equitable way.
> Maybe outright outlawing lobbying would help.
Outlaw communicating with legislators to try to get them to adopt a position on legislation?
Or do you mean outlawing paid lobbying on behalf of third parties?
The first would obviously be deeply problematic even if it was possible to police, the latter would probably generally be ineffective however you managed to operationalize it.
> Outlaw communicating with legislators to try to get them to adopt a position on legislation?
Of course not. Communicating with legislators isn't what's considered lobbying I guess (at least as far as I understand it). Lobbying as far as I understand (or rather, object) is when special interest groups (usually funded by large corporations) fund people to talk to legislators for them, including buying fancy dinners, "conferences" and stuff. Basically, the opposite of grassroots.
See here: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/09/22/lobbyists-flout-eth...
Calling/emailing your chosen congresspeople of course is totally fine by me, it's actually very healthy to do so if you have a legitimate concern.
> the latter would probably generally be ineffective however you managed to operationalize it
How would it be ineffective? I suppose it depends on oversight, but it should be fairly easy to prevent it seems.
> Communicating with legislators isn't what's considered lobbying
It basically is.
You may be thinking of who is considered a lobbyist or lobbying firm, which is (roughly, different laws on the matter have different specific definitions) someone (or some firm) who (or which) is paid to lobby on behalf of one or more other persons or entities.
> How would it be ineffective?
Because even if you are able to police it effectively, then the people that have money will instead lobby personally rather than hiring lobbyists, while hiring staff to do all the legislative drafting and organizational support work for their personal lobbying (but not actually doing the lobbying itself) as well as continuing to use the unlimited campaign financing channels opened by Buckley v. Valeo and Citizens United to get people who they don't need to lobby once in office to convince them to vote in line with their interests elected.
>Maybe outright outlawing lobbying would help
I doubt it. The cure is way worse than the disease and is a direct path to totalitarianism. The influence of capital will not go to the people, it will go to the government, and the government will use it to depend even less on the will of the people.