Nothing new here. Lobbying is just legalized corruption. Lobbying works if you put enough money in lobbying politicians and since Uber is mostly popular... There is no way around it, the taxi industry as we know it will vanished. But I don't really want Uber to be the 'new boss'...
What's most pathetic is that the peasants take up arms for Uber to crush any resistance. It drives me nuts. Sure, you love Uber, I love the service they provide too, but there are always consequences when you get in bed with the devil.
I wonder if there is a way to take the corruption out of lobbying.
Imagine a public area where lobbyists could post lobbying materials (videos, notes, slides, research, etc) and then the public could have a way to like the ones they thought were the most important.
As the most liked issues filtered up there could be a team of public (since governments a bad word to some people) fact checkers who would check the claims asserted, and put out possibility estimates.
From there there'd have to be some sort of action plan committee which would commission experts to make proposals and evaluate the presented solutions.
And from there, things would start to happen.
Private lobbying would only be legal when all presentations, correspondence, and meetings were recorded and transcribed for public release.
Of course, this requires a tremendous amount of effort on the publics part and a well connected and engaged public. It may be that a politician would be elected based on the team of 15 lobby likers he presented (or some such idea). If those lobby likers focused on some of the same issues the electorate wanted to focus on they'd elect that guy.
It's far fetched and would probably require publicly funded elections, but, shit, it's gotta be better than the no holds barred, resolutely opaque, money begotten system we have today.
Lobbyists certainly have a place, but they shouldn't be the only ones with the official's ears.
I've thought about the problem before, and I think a good model is the judiciary. You can "lobby" the Supreme Court, but only via amicus curiae[1] briefs.
This preserves the benefits of lobbying (conveying to the ruler that "if you do this, you will cause this bad thing"), but makes it more obvious when someone is receiving bad arguments.
Unfortunately, representatives aren't required, like the Supreme Court, to declare "I'm voting this way because of these considerations", and it's not a 100% good thing either -- sometimes there are politically sensitive compromises where candor is punished at the polls.
