[CodeMage]

I'm sorry if my question is naive, but it's been bothering me for a while now: why doesn't anyone consider the lobbying itself to be the root problem? I'm not from the US, so I haven't grown up with that system and to me it sounds like legalized corruption.

The only reason I can come up with for allowing lobbying is the same reason why people want to legalize drugs: illegal corruption would be a lot worse than legalized corruption. Is that it? Or am I missing something?

[danielweber]

For most people it's: "Lobbying is bad when it's for things I don't like."

The ability to petition the government was so important to the Founders that they wrote it into the First Amendment. (Madison, among others, was hostile to the Bill Of Rights because he thought those were things that were obviously not allowed to government, and that delineating them would cause people to think that the Constitution was a list of the people's rights instead of a list of the powers granted to the government.)

In the modern day, though, the government has so much power and influence over people's lives that it becomes necessary to spend a significant fraction of your attention -- or hire someone else to do it -- to government to make sure they aren't about to legislate you out of existence. See Uber as an example.

Influencing government is usually a zero-sum game that people are forced to play. It would be swell if "the other side" unilaterally disarmed so we could disarm, too, but they don't trust us any more than we trust them.

[CodeMage]

Again, I seem to be missing something. Isn't there a great deal of difference between "petitioning the government" and "paying the government"?

Here's an excerpt from briandear's comment about lobbying:

We all know who Hollywood gives the majority of their money to, and the people that receive it do their bidding. Hollywood isn't the problem any more than Google or Facebook's lobbies are the problem.

It look pretty clear to me that there is some sort of mechanism in United States whereby people/organizations pay money to steer the government. That's what I was inquiring about.

[danielweber]

Petitioning the government is lobbying the government. That's what lobbying is, no more or no less.

I don't speak for the other commenter and wouldn't think to explain his comment. However, when people speak about the government being bought, they generally mean one of three things, correctly or not:

1. Lobbying. Someone spends a lot of money to hire people with connections who can catch the ear of government.

2. Campaign donations. You can donate money directly to someone's campaign, or even exercise your free speech rights yourself to endorse or criticize someone's campaign.

3. Simple bribery. This is when you find a Senator with a few hundred thousand dollars of cash in his freezer.