re: #145 lostlakehiker

Why are you talking about ‘zero-sum’? It really doesn’t relate to the subject.

Our vast lobbying industry is a symptom of having too much riding on politics already. Make politics yet more important, and the marginal utility of further spending on lobbying can only increase.

The marginal utility of spending on lobbying is not just the value gained, but the value not lost. In other words, if a bill is coming up to, say, ban child labor, those companies that employ lots of child laborers will find a great deal of marginal utility in lobbying against that bill.

We have an open legislative system; the government can create bills whenever it wants, on whatever subject it wants. So, what determines the real marginal utility of that lobbying money is the legal channels of lobbying, not some ‘more or less politics’ measurement.

So we have to cut down the middle somewhere. Arguments for steering left often glide right past the costs of lobbying,

There’s no such thing as ‘left’.

or they discount the connection between the extent to which things ride on politics and the scale of lobbying effort seen.

No, really, the amount that politics ‘matters’ is constant. Companies don’t lobby less when regulation is more lax— the new marginal utility is for them to lobby for even laxer regulations. You’re creating this weird situation where there’s this possibility of ‘more’ or ‘less’ politics being involved.

I think what you’re trying, but failing, to get at is that if the government is the provider of a service, like health insurance, then there is no possible market solution to underservice. This is ignoring, of course, that private health insurance is allowed under most single-payer plans, so your overall point is moot. But in so far as it isn’t moot— imagining a purely single-payer system with no private insurance allowed— then it is possible to imagine that those with more political clout will gain preference in the delivery of the health insurance— by diseases for white males being compensated for at a higher rate than those for black females, etc. However, for your point to have much validity, you’d have to show that that inequality would be greater than our current inequality.