Why Political Lobbying is Allowed & Encouraged - Defending the Indefensible - How Money Works | How Money Works

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1:00Visible puts unlimited 5G data and hotspot in the palm of your hand, powered by Verizon's 5G network, with no contract holding you back. And for a limited time, you can get visible for just $19 a month for 12 months when you use promo code Save Six. All the features of Big Wireless Service for half the cost. Tap the banner to switch today. Terms apply. Standard rate applies at month 13. See visible.com for planned features and network management details. $3.5 billion were spent on political lobbying in 2019 alone. What's more is that political donations that funded presidential campaign ads topped $14 billion. These astronomical sums are not reserved for the highest echelons of federal politics either. Every year, vast fortunes are spent on influencing policy decisions from the Oval Office and Congress all the way down to local city councils. But why is this allowed? Political lobbying combined with huge campaign contributions from wealthy individuals and companies has started to seem tantamount to bribery.

2:04Where the best interests of the voting public are seconded to those who write the biggest donation check, fundamentally undermining the democratic process. Right? Well, it's time to defend the indefensible by learning how many works to influence politics, and why we should want it to stay like this. Now before we get into the actual arguments in favor of political lobbying and campaign contributions, we need to get one thing out of the way. That is, that all of this is the law. The First Amendment, as discerned by the US Supreme Court, protects politicians and their supporters right to speak freely on political issues and in support or opposition of political individuals, parties or ideas. To write to free speech extends to using any legal means necessary to promote those ideas as loudly as possible. Now whether spending money really counts as a form of speech is still a bit contentious. But hey, the Supreme Court with the decisions in the landmark citizens united and Buckley B. Vallejo cases have kind of expressed that money in politics is a form of speech.

3:05Setting all that aside, let's explore why constitutionally mandated or not, this whole process might still be a really good thing. So to get started, we need to make a distinction between political lobbying and political donations, because they are two separate things. Political donations are pretty straightforward. It is the financial contributions paid to a political party or candidate for them to use on their election or re-election campaigns. Political lobbying is a little bit different. It involves special interest groups operating to actively sway the decision-making process of a politician, a party or the entire government. It sounds pretty nefarious on the surface, but think of it like this. If you've ever attended something as simple as a town hall meeting, devise your opinion on what should happen to a ban in lot 48, well, you've engaged in political lobbying. Political lobbying does not need to involve money at all, and it normally doesn't. But the larger special interest groups that take lobbying much more seriously will normally be funded by large institutions or extremely wealthy individuals.

4:09This money will be used for a few things. It will normally be used to create some kind of awareness about the group. It will be used to pay off office facilities, and it will be used to pay the salaries of people that basically turn complaining in a public forum into a full-time job. Of course, this money can also be used for donations. Now technically, this can't be transactional, an agreement of something like $200,000 for a yes vote on an upcoming bill, that would be illegal. But that's where the marketing from earlier comes in, because lobbyists really walk this rule right up to the line. If a special interest lobbying group named Americans for Lower Taxes makes a contribution to your political campaign and you later publicly vote to support a new capital gains tax legislation, well, it should be pretty obvious that you aren't getting any more donations from them in the future, and chances are they will probably fund the opponent instead. Good luck. The types of people that can afford to fund these organizations tend to have a different objective than the common man, and sometimes those objectives would even be at odds with

5:11what the majority might want. So, obviously, this is a pretty gross misuse of financial dominance to subvert the outcome of the democratic process, right? Well, not necessarily. For starters, a good chunk of this money still does come from regular people. I am once again asking for your financial support. But more so than that, these organizations are actually limited on how they can make these donations. Right off the bat, the federal law does not allow corporations to donate money directly to political candidates, so they need to find alternatives. So what they do instead is use what's known as soft money. These institutions will pay to have a presence in Washington, and a working personal relationship with lawmakers through their agents. These agents can work as experts on certain issues and even draft legislation for lawmakers to put before Congress. Again, this might sound bad, but in reality, our political system relies on these agents to operate effectively. I don't know if you've noticed, but a lot of lawmakers are f**king stupid.

6:13But I'd ask you, how does that show up on a seven-year-old's iPhone who's playing a kids game? Congressmen, iPhone, is made by a different company. A majority of them are ex-loyers at best, or cranky old businessmen looking for something to do in retirement at worst. Imagine you put the issue of something like encrypted data collection in front of your grandparents to debate over, and you might start seeing the issue. Sometimes these guys have no idea what they are legislating. For what it's worth, that's fine. It's impossible to expect all these lawmakers to be experts on all things, which is why they are free to ask for help. A political lobbyist from the tech space will be able to explain in-depth ramifications of a proposed piece of legislation. They will also be able to speak about this using the kind of legal jargon that only lawmakers, lawyers, and judges really understand, but it's still important for creating robust legislation. Of course, these lobbyists are paid by the tech companies, so they will always try and spend any proposal in favor of the tech companies they represent.

7:16But lawmakers know this, and a good ongoing relationship requires a bit of honesty from these lobbyists, otherwise these politicians aren't going to ask for their help anymore. Now, you might say, well, why don't we just pay? It's football season, and you can now get almost anything you need for Game Day delivered with Uber Eats. What do we mean by almost? You can't get a running back delivered, but you can get baby back ribs delivered. A strong defense? No. A strong deodorant? Yes. The Six Pack of Abs? No.

8:16Six pack of beer? Yes. Get almost almost anything for Game Day delivered with Uber Eats. The Fish Along Demand Food Delivery Partner of the NFL Order Now, alcohol 21 plus and Inselect City's Product Availability Varies by Regency App for Details. Visible puts unlimited 5G data and hotspot in the palm of your hand, powered by Verizon's 5G network, with no contract holding you back. And for a limited time, you can get visible for just $19 a month for 12 months when you use promo code Save Six. All the features of Big Wireless Service for half the cost. Tap the banner to switch today. And supply, Standard Rate applies at month 13. See visible.com for plan features and network management details. A to have public expertise advice politicians in order to take out the special interests of these pieces of advice. And you might be able to guess it. That would be really expensive. People that are qualified enough to speak with confidence on the legislative process while also being experts on topics ranging from technology to medical research all the

9:17way up to environmental sustainability attract fat salaries. You would also need lots of them, because not all of them are going to be experts on all issues. You would also need enough to go around between all of the lawmakers considering an important issue. It's just not feasible. But perhaps all of this is skirting around the main issue. As hard as I try and defend it, there are loopholes in place that allow massive piles of money to flow into election campaigns that are costing more money than most people's entire extended family will see in 100 lifetimes. Okay, but consider the alternatives. There are a few options here. State funded election campaigns, exclusively self-funded campaigns, were no funding allowed at all. Let's start with the last one. Some groups have floated the idea of eliminating campaign funding altogether. Instead, candidates would be invited to attend a series of public forums where they could debate issues and that would be the extent of the process. The problem here is that it disproportionately favors incumbent lawmakers, because they

10:20will be the person that the people know. But the same logic, it also favors people who have a strong public image outside of politics, i.e. celebrities. And if there's one thing we don't need, it's more celebrities and politics. It also doesn't necessarily stop someone else with a big audience swinging the result of an election. Think of someone like Casey Neistat who made two videos supporting Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden in their respective presidential elections. Casey was well within his right to do this, of course. First to amendment and all that good stuff. But he could get that message out to millions of potentially undecided voters. And if actual politicians didn't have a platform to share their counter-argument, well, then politics would quickly turn into a game of who has the most famous friends. Well, okay. What if instead the government gave these candidates a budget they could spend anyway they like on promoting their campaign? Sure, it might cost taxpayer dollars, but maybe that is worth it to get corporate influence out of politics. The problem is, how do you distribute this money?

11:20You could distribute it to parties based on the seats they currently hold in government. But this can cause drastic and irreversible chain reactions that favor one party over another. If one party has a really good election cycle, they would get more money in the next election. And likely when more seats, which would give them more money in the election after that, and so on until they control the entire government. The other alternative is to just give money to every candidate, but this causes other issues. Mostly people just running for office to get money from the government. Now some states actually run what are called clean elections, which is basically what has been described here. And this problem of non-seers competitors is a really big deal. If this became widespread enough, people could just make it their full-time job to run for every election out there and secure themselves some campaign funding. Now you might say this sounds simple to solve. Just throw these fraudulent candidates in jail, and yeah sure, I suppose that could work. But no great government in history relied on throwing political candidates in prison in

12:22order to run proper elections. Yeah, the optics of that would be awful. Alright, alright. What about only allowing self-funded election campaigns? Well, this is the worst solution of the bunch. This is how you get nothing but billionaires being president, because they are the only ones that can afford to pay for all the TV ads, rallies, and public appearances across the country. The current system of political lobbying is far from perfect. And yes, there do look to be some policy decisions made in the past that work more to secure political funding more so than acting in the best interests of the public. But as the great Winston Churchill once said, it's the worst system of government, except for all of the alternatives. This was the second video in our series of defending the industries that look to be indefensible. If you enjoyed this topic, go watch our first video in this series, which defended the multi-level marketing industry, and explored why they have managed to avoid being classed as pyramid schemes, despite clearly being pyramid schemes. And as always, please consider liking and subscribing to keep on learning how money works.

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