Quote Originally Posted by Steely Glint View Post
I did look around at some figures for who spends what on lobbying. From what I found, vast majority of the money spent on lobbying is spent by corporations, or trade associations which represent them. But it was pretty cursory. I will likely post details when I have more time and as the thread develops. Or you can just google it yourselves.
Money isn't the only indicator regardless of how much lefties pretend it is. The main two indicators of effectiveness are the number of members and the strength of the organization (i.e. are many of those members active and/or willing to do what they're told by their leadership). One without the other isn't very useful. Money can partially make up for weaknesses in either category, but not much. Then you have secondary factors like whether the organization has a permanent, full-time employed staff and leadership, whether the lobbying is on an issue that has a national salience (the less salient the issue, the more likely an interest group is to get its way), etc. You really need to stop making the same flawed assumption about the strength of advocacy groups as you do about elections; money helps, but it's mostly an indicator of underlying strength/support, not a dominant factor in producing results. The reason most money is spent by corporations is because *drum roll* money is the main resource possessed by corporations. It's how they try to make up for their other weaknesses.

You also have a warped idea of the political process if you think anyone "buys" legislation. Interest groups A) help elect people who share their interests, and B) give money to keep those people in office. The reason those people vote in a manner conductive to the interest groups is mainly because they share their interests and/or constituencies, not because of the money per se. And the reason some legislation is a thinly plagiarized product given to legislators by interest groups is because the latter don't have the expertise or resources to write good legislation on most issue areas, and they take a short-cut by copying the proposed legislation by groups they A) already agree with, B) know have the required expertise and resources. If you want legislators to write all the legislation, you're going to have to vastly expand the amount of money given to each legislator to conduct the necessary research, particularly at the local level where legislators are many but expertise is nearly non-existent. This is less of a problem in a country like Britain, because a vast majority of the legislation comes from the top, and the prime minister has plenty of resources at his/her disposal.