If you want to outlaw lobbying by for-profit corporations, then they'll just create subsidiary lobbying organizations. The NRA is a 501(c)(4), which is also a tax exempt non-profit designation, and realistically it serves primarily as a lobbying group for gun manufacturers.

"We know you don't have time to dig deep. Here is a summary of the research, and our recommendations based on it."

Edit: I also once had a fairly cynical view of lobbyists. But then some people I know went to work for lobby groups after they graduated. When I looked into the types of lobby groups they went to, they were fairly impressive. Things like advocating for homeless, advocating for people without health care, etc.

Lobbyists often are, and, whether or not they themselves are, are almost invariably supported by, domain experts.

> They are salesmen

Yeah, but they are salesmen who do the public policy equivalent of technical sales, and it's a field where selectivity is high because you are selling to a very small number of very high value customers.

Career bureaucrats are the ones who run many of hundred things that run the government. Politicians need to provide direction and reflect the will of the people. Hardly need to career politicians for that. Younger representation is critical to make sure the voice of youth is being heard.

Do you think any politician understands the needs of the millennial generation ? Any long term policy like say education enacted now is going to impact the future generations more than anyone else.

In both houses, committees now screen out fewer bills assigned to them and are more likely to see their work rewritten at later stages. The practice of“hijacking” Assembly bills—gutting their contents and amending them thoroughly in the Senate—has increased sharply. As a body, the Legislature is less likely to alter theGovernor’s Budget, and its own budget process neither encourages fiscal discipline nor links legislators’ requests to overall spending goals. In addition, legislative oversight of the executive branch has declined significantly.

...legislators are learning more quickly than their precursors, but that frequent changes in the membership and leadership of legislative committees, especially in the Assembly, diminish their expertise in many important policy areas. Many committees lack the experience to weed out bad bills and to ensure that agencies are acting efficiently and in accordance with legislative intent.

That said, overall the summary finds that the effects of term limits were neither as good as proponents hoped or as bad as detractors feared.

1: "How Have Term Limits Affected the California Legislature?" https://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/rb/RB_1104BCRB.pdf

For example, H.R. 5323, Derivatives Fairness Act drafted on behalf of CitiGroup.

Moreover, it works the other way round as well. If, say, a teacher returns back to school after a term in state senate, the school will get access to invaluable wealth of knowledge of government internals.

And lobbyists aren't experts either, they're simply paid to bribe people to get a result.

This implies that the EFF does not have expertise in privacy and free speech. Would you agree with that?

EFF is probably the antithesis of most lobbyists, certainly the ones being discussed here.

The expertise they have is in glad-handing, personally enriching themselves, and playing political games. They're certainly not subject matter experts in anything outside that realm. Term limits don't have to mean that we're losing out on this valuable "expertise", it could be something as simple as "retire at 65", you know, like everyone else in every other industry aspires to do.

Except many of them clearly are. Bill Foster worked as a particle physicist at Fermilab for 22 years [1]. Sean Casten started and sold an energy recycling company called Recycled Energy Development [2]. Those are two examples just from suburban Chicago. Try not to let political cynicism cloud reality.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Foster_(politician) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Casten

How many? And I think it's particularly telling that the folks you managed to find are newbies to the political arena and not career politicians, a class of individuals that can only exist thanks to the absence of term limits. Also telling is that in Foster's case, his expertise is completely useless in a political context. Let me know when he gets around to drafting a major particle physics bill.

I'm not sure, I provided two examples to prove your assertion wrong. Surely, you can find more if you look.

== And I think it's particularly telling that the folks you managed to find are newbies to the political arena and not career politicians==

Can you name a career field where experience is considered a bad thing? Does your career have term limits, would people be more effective at it if they did? The free market seems to pay specialists more than generalists, due to higher perceived value.

Politics is the only place I have ever heard this argument. Foster was first elected in 2008, so he's hardly a "newbie".

==Also telling is that in Foster's case, his expertise is completely useless in a political context. Let me know when he gets around to drafting a major particle physics bill.==

Huh? The House holds the purse strings and decides funding on things like the Energy Department, which funds Fermilab, or NASA. I think he might have something to add in that arena.

I think it's time for you to counter by defending your thesis, that lobbyists generally don't have domain expertise, instead of demanding increasingly more evidence.