Suckers! (lobbying groups)

• Author: Rauch, Jonathan

Washington's parasite class keeps growing and growing and growing and...

"Let us give this capital back to the people to whom it belongs!" cries Bill Clinton, in his inaugural address. Take government back from "the people who always figure out a way to prosper even as more Americans suffer," says former California governor Jerry Brown, during his 1992 presidential campaign. Take government back from the "permanent class of career legislators," writes the columnist George F. Will. Take government back from "the awesome power of the Washington nomenklatura," says Will Marshall of the Democratic Leadership Council's think tank in Washington. Everyone is getting into the take-government-back act.

Conservatives have always spoken of Washington as being, in some worrisome sense, out of control, but recently consternation has washed centerward. Sen. Robert Kerrey of Nebraska (like Jerry Brown, a 1992 Democratic presidential contender) talks grimly about the strangely self-referential, self-feeding quality of modern government. "We allow interest groups to create new bureaucracies and then the bureaucracies serve the interest groups," he says. Across Capitol Hill, Rep. Timothy J. Penny (D-Minn.) says glumly, "It's a control game we're playing now. It's an insider's game." From Penny and Kerrey and Marshall and Will and Brown and Clinton and others comes a chorus of demands to "give this capital back to the people to whom it belongs."

The issue at hand is not just the size and growth of government but the size and growth of the professional lobbying industry attached to and feeding upon government. It was said of the Soviet military complex that when we built, they built, and when we didn't build, they still built. Something similar seems to happen with lobbies: When government grows, they grow, and when government doesn't grow, they still grow, though maybe not as fast.

The take-government-back crowd assumes that, somehow, Washington can be restored "to the people." But what if they're wrong? Few have yet confronted this question: What if government cannot be "taken back" from the entrepreneurial professionals who increasingly dominate it? Emergent theory and postwar experience give reason to think that the infestation of parasites in Washington is ineradicable. Worse, the infestation isn't stable. It grows.

On this score, the facts speak without ambiguity. By all known measures, the transfer-seeking economy has grown spectacularly over the past 30 or so years, with no end in sight. The number of groups listed in the Encyclopedia of Associations more than quadrupled between 1956 and 1990, from 4,900 to more than 22,000. Those groups represent only a fraction of the total. The number just of environmental groups, including local cleanup coalitions and the like, is now estimated at 7,000; the number of gay groups listed in the Washington Blade's resource guide grew from 307 in December 1990 to 405 earlier this year. Not all groups lobby, of course, but many do. Evidence suggests, indeed, that groups have become more likely to engage in lobbying; the proportion of trade associations based in Washington has been steadily rising, which suggests deepening political involvement.

Counting lobbyists is hard, but all counts show increases. The number of active lobbyists registered with the U.S. Senate has jumped from 3,000 in 1976 to around 8,000 last year; between 1961 and 1982, the number of corporations with Washington offices increased tenfold. The number of lawyers in Washington quadrupled between 1972 and 1987, from 11,000 to 45,000. And the investment in politics, as measured by real campaign spending, has tripled since the early 1960s.

One could go on and on this way. The data leave no doubt that the past several decades have witnessed explosive growth in the lobbying sector--a trend quite unruffled by the comings and goings of Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals, Reagan or Clinton or whomever. Why?

At the heart of the problem are the curious internal mechanics of the goody-hunting industry, with its virus-like ability to convert the organs of government into factories producing more lobbies. To understand why this parasitic subeconomy grows and grows, ascend some steps in the spiral logic of lobbying.

1) Transfer seeking--the chasing of existing wealth--is inherently alluring to individuals yet inherently hazardous for society. The concept...