Lobbying & Rent Seeking

"Gordon Tullock is not a household name. It's a shame that he's not. In contrast, disgraced Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich is a household name. It's a shame that he is.

These two men have little in common except that Mr. Tullock, an eminent economist, is the first scholar who systematically grasped and explained why the actions of politicians such as Mr. Blagojevich are so...

"Williams Scotsman In testimony delivered March 16 on Capitol Hill, ABC General Counsel Maurice Baskin, a partner with Venable, L.L.P., stated that recent administration efforts to make project labor agreements (PLAs) part of the federal procurement process are 'threatening to violate the longstanding Congressional mandate of full and open competition in federal procurement—at taxpayers’...

"I'm always happy to use my favorite phrase ('It's a feature, not a bug') to describe the problems of corporate-state entanglements, and this AP report, which details the incestuous relationship between off-shore gas and oil companies and the regulatory agencies responsible for overseeing them, provides an opportunity. The revolving door here spins at least as fast as in the banking industry...

"Gallup's annual update on the honesty and ethical standards of people in various professions finds a new entry ranking at the bottom of the list. For the first time, Gallup asked the public to rate the honesty and ethical standards of lobbyists, and only 5% describe their ethics as 'very high' or 'high.' Lobbyists, car salesmen (5%), and advertising practitioners (6%) are the lowest-rated...

"According to Wikipedia, market failure is 'a term used by economists to describe the condition where the allocation of goods and services by a market is not efficient.' One source of market failure is related to the distribution of...

"Regulation consists of requirements the government imposes on private firms and individuals to achieve government’s purposes. These include better and cheaper services and goods, protection of existing firms from 'unfair' (and fair) competition, cleaner water and air, and safer workplaces and products. Failure to meet regulations can result in fines, orders to cease doing certain things, or,...

"The effects of a tariff, which is an excise tax on imported items, are the same as any excise tax: the tariff will raise price, reduce quantity, and decrease the consumers' surplus. A quota is a restriction of imports that also raises price, reduces quantity, and decreases the consumers' surplus. For example, in 1985, the world price of sugar was a bit over three cents a pound, whereas the U....

"Taxing your competitors to subsidize your industry is a rent-seeker’s dream. Usually you have to be more subtle about it. But if you have a 'green' business idea, you can get liberal journalists to write gushing stories about you without even stopping to ask, 'Hey, aren’t you going to benefit from these initiatives and laws you’re pushing? Isn’t that sort of like, you know, corporate welfare...

"The substance of Roberts’ arguments is not aimed at improving the quality of the federal judiciary, but at reinforcing the privileged status afforded 'elite' lawyers such as himself. As with his criticism of courthouse 'rents', Roberts’ concerns can only be addressed by ending the government monopoly on judicial services and allowing the market to act. But Roberts simply wants more...

"In detailing how the lawmakers approached their earmarking, however, the ethics report and accompanying reports by the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) made clear that the wall between grants and donations in their offices was in many instances very thin. Key individuals in their offices played at least some role in both activities, starting with the lawmakers and typically including...

"The life insurance industry is a lobbying giant. In the first half of 2010, for example, the entire industry – all the companies together with their trade groups – spent about $10 million per month on lobbying Washington, according to an analysis of data from the Center for Responsive Politics. Only three industries – pharmaceuticals, electric utilities, and oil and gas – spent more over the...

"One of the key missions of the Centre for Regulation and Competition is to relate the design of regulatory structures and institutions to economic growth and thereby to the relief of poverty. The connection between corruption and poverty, or the lack of growth, is more often assumed, than demonstrated (Mauro, 1995, 1998), and if the question remains still controversial, I suspect that this is...

"How do firms allocate their lobbying resources among their political goals? We approach this question using a rent-seeking model that integrates three concepts from the lobbying literature: the distinction between a private and a collective rent, the level of competition over the rent, and the impact of political scarcity over the availability of the rent. The model demonstrates how rent...

"The rise of the professional lobbyist has meant an incredible – and potentially dangerous – concentration of power over government within a small, elite cadre of people. This concentration of power, in turn, means it is ever-so essential for legislators and the public to know who is paying the lobbyists how much to lobby whom on what. Legislators need this information to properly evaluate the...

"The Federal Estate Tax (aka, death tax) is currently repealed, due to a provision in the 2001 Economic Growth Tax Relief and Reconciliation Act (EGTRRA). However, on January 1, 2011, the tax comes back at the rate of 55 percent on all estates above $1 million.

Estate tax advocates often portray their fight as a struggle for fairness against greedy billionaires and spoiled heiresses...

"This Article advances an alternative rationale which could support some, though not all, of the recent wave of new lobbying regulations: the state’s interest in preventing the socially inefficient activity of rent-seeking. Less technically, the government’s interest is in promoting national economic welfare. Rent-seeking occurs when resources are dedicated to capturing a government benefit,...

"Tobacco has become an arena of civil warfare throughout the Western world over the past half-century or so. This war has been fueled by an ideological rhetoric that speaks of the costs that smokers place on nonsmokers (Office of Technology Assessment (1985)(1993)). The state claims to wage the war to protect innocent nonsmokers from predatory attacks by smokers. This claim has now been...

"Representative democracy does not necessarily eliminate political corruption. Existing models explain the survival of rent-taking politicians by ideological divisions in the electorate and/or informational asymmetries. The current paper demonstrate that rent extraction can persist even if voters are fully informed and ideologically homogenous. We show that in such an environment, voters may...

"This paper examines the relationship between rent seeking and economic performance when governments cannot enforce property rights. With imperfect credit markets and a fixed cost of rent seeking, only wealthy agents choose to engage in it, since it enables them to protect their wealth from expropriation. Hence, the level of rent seeking and economic performance are determined by the initial...

"The private advantage of rent seeking is largely determined by the 'rules' of the rent-seeking contest. These 'rules' determine both the acceptable range of rent-seeking methods and the payoffs of private investments in rent-seeking contests. To the extent that existing formal and informal rules can be modified or new formal rules introduced rent-seeking losses can clearly be reduced (or...

"Most Americans recognize that politics has a lot to do with the pursuit of power, privilege, and special interests; however, there is a general presumption that environmental politics is somehow different. We take for granted that environmental laws are what they seem; that the legislators who enact those laws and the bureaucrats who implement them are earnestly struggling to protect public...

"This article examines the use of sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) standards as a method for protectionism through the lens of political economy. Technical measures, especially SPS, remain a potential barrier to free trade, in spite of substantial progress on trade liberalization under the Uruguay round of trade negotiations. In fact, in the 1986–93 Uruguay Round negotiations, separate...

"It is almost three decades since the classic paper by Tullock (1967) on rent-seeking. This was in response to the challenge to the economics profession voiced by Mundell (1962) — the apparently minuscule welfare losses from monopolies as indicated by the empirical estimates of the Harberger triangles. Subsequently, there was an explosion of literature on rent-seeking. There have been two...

"What were the purposes for establishment of central banks? Central banks are historically relatively young organizations. Their main purposes are to regulate money supply through interest rates, regulate the banking sector and act as a lender of last resort to banking sector during the time of financial crises. Historical evidence suggests that in the second half of 19th century in the USA...

"A country's most talented people typically organize production by others, so they can spread their ability advantage over a larger scale. When they start firms, they innovate and foster growth, but when they become rent seekers, they only redistribute wealth and reduce growth. Occupational choice depends on returns to ability and to scale in each sector, on market size and on compensation...

"The public choice revolution provided the answer. Government is not a corrective device. It is not a pinch hitter we can count on to supply a base hit whenever we fear the market might strike out. Government is not a person, it has no mind or conscience. It is simply a set of processes by which people relate to one another. Governmental decisions and policies are simply the outcomes of the...

"The topic we're discussing today, public unionism and its consequences, is very likely to be the most important domestic economic issue of the next decade. If wage demands and pension and health benefits of unionized public employees are not derailed from their current path, public unionism by itself will more than likely bankrupt most of the states and probably the nation as a whole even...

A Petition, also now commonly known as the Petition of the Candlemakers or the Candlemakers' Petition, is a satirical publication addressed to the French Chamber of Deputies. It illustrates the rent seeking concept by purporting to petition the Chamber to enact restrictions on the sun and the use of "all openings, holes, chinks, and fissures through which the light of the sun is wont to enter...

"New Zealand is a small open economy that is remote from all major markets. The smallness and remoteness of New Zealand combine to imply that this country has, at least quantitatively, distinctive features for the regulation of economic activity by competition law. The isolation and small size of the economy mean that typically all but exporting firms are small as judged on a world scale, and...

This is an executive order by President Barack Obama regarding the institution and enforcement of ethical regulations on government officials and their relation to lobbyists and lobbying organizations.

"An Act
To provide for the disclosure of lobbying activities to influence the Federal Government, and for other purposes.
The Congress finds that—
(1) responsible representative Government requires public awareness of the efforts of paid lobbyists to influence the public decision making process in both the legislative and executive branches of the Federal Government;
(2...

"In the decade since enactment of the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 (LDA), concerns have been raised about the capacity of Congress to oversee the activities of professional lobbyists. Lobbyists and others who seek to participate in public policy activities through the formation of coalitions and associations whose members may not be identifiable, and the use of grassroots campaigns that...

"THOSE WHO FIRST pick up this book are likely to share some concern about the problem of poverty; those who finish it may also find some cause for hope. For the great gift that Henry George gave the world was a systematic explanation—logical and consistent—of why wealth is not distributed fairly among those who produce it. But he did not stop there—he also gave us a simple yet far-reaching...

"Excessively large government harms economic growth. The evidence is overwhelming, both from U.S. and international experience. The Joint Economic Committee (JEC) has published five studies that document the reasons excessive government reduces economic growth. One particular problem with excessive government is that it unleashes socially-destructive 'rent seeking.' Rent seeking diverts...

"Fifty years ago, Professor Edward S. Corwin wrote an introduction to this treatise that broadly explored then existent trends of constitutional adjudication. In some respects the law of federalism, the withdrawal of judicial supervision of economic regulation, the continued expansion of presidential power and the consequent overshadowing of Congress – he has been confirmed in his evaluations...

"It is the purpose of this paper to show some of the ways in which rent seeking is competitive, and to develop a simple model of competitive rent seeking for the important case when rents originate from quantitative restrictions upon international trade. In such a case 1) competitive rent seeking leads to the operation of the economy inside its transformation curve; 2) the welfare loss...

"Theory and History is primarily a critique of Karl Marx, his materialism, and his prediction of the inevitability of socialism. This book discusses the theory of economics, i.e., the study of purposive human action, and with history, the record of the past actions of individuals. History looks backward into the past, but the lesson it teaches concerns things to come. It opens the...

"Lobbying and Advocacy is the comprehensive guide for lobbyists and Washington advocates.

* Top strategies for winning as an effective lobbyist or Washington advocate.
* Practical resources and methods for maintaining compliance and staying abreast of ethical and legal requirements.
* Practical tips, research based methods, and step-by-step guides for communicating with...

"The concepts of rents and rent-seeking are central to any discussion of the processes of economic development. Yet conventional models of rent-seeking are unable to explain how it can drive decades of rapid growth in some countries, and at other times be associated with spectacular economic crises. This book argues that the rent-seeking framework has to be radically extended by incorporating...

"It is the purpose of this book to consolidate the rent-seeking research program, to disseminate its major contributions throughout the academy of social sciences, to excite a new generation of students to join in the promulgation of the program, and to popularize the insight, to the extent possible, among the informed lay public. The book should make a timely contribution in guiding the...

"The Center for Responsive Politics is the nation's premier research group tracking money in U.S. politics and its effect on elections and public policy. Nonpartisan, independent and nonprofit, the organization aims to create a more educated voter, an involved citizenry and a more transparent and responsive government. In short, the Center's mission is to:

• Inform citizens about...

"Reason is the monthly print magazine of 'free minds and free markets.' It covers politics, culture, and ideas through a provocative mix of news, analysis, commentary, and reviews. Reason provides a refreshing alternative to right-wing and left-wing opinion magazines by making a principled case for liberty and individual choice...