Fun fact of the day: lobbying is legal and common across all of Europe. It's why the EU has such intense agriculture protectionism, the farmers act as an interest group that constantly lobbies on their own behalf. It's why Germany's domestic auto market has been specifically set up for decades to protect the domestic players against foreign competition. Go into Western Europe and try threatening Airbus, good luck, they'll lobby you right out of the EU unless you have a superpower backing you.

Lobbying does not mean corruption is legalized in the US.

In my observation, people that claim lobbying is legalized corruption in the US, don't know anything about the laws that surround lobbying, the limits, how it works, and how it doesn't work. It's primarily a popular Reddit-knowledge (aka low quality, easy to throw around, often wrong or incomplete) bumper sticker to post online. People routinely go to jail for violating the strict laws surrounding lobbying. You can't buy politicans and you can't buy legislation; trying that is a quick trip to prison.

Lobbying in the US is more lax than in most of Western Europe, that much is true. Althought the special interests in Europe are every bit as potent as those in the US. As a politician, just try going after farm subsidies in the EU, see what happens to you.

As is usually the case when it comes to fake Reddit-knowledge, the reality of lobbying in the US is far more nuanced and complicated. I understand people love their bumper stickers though, for artificial virtue signaling purposes ("Free Tibet").

You can hire a registered lobbyist and they can argue a position that you favor. That's most of what you can do. And nearly everything to do with lobbying in the US is public information due to hefty disclosure requirements.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobbying_in_the_United_States

Well, lobbying is not an instance of retail corruption, where everyone is on sale for some price. However, it (lobbying) is a form of network corruption--where individual acts don't appear corrupt. At a macro level, they appear corrupt. Anyway, network corruption can't be prosecuted.

Now that bribery is explicitly legal in the US, and lobbyists deliver the bribes, lobbying has become more or less synonymous with bribery, because who would pay any attention to a lobbyist without a bribe in hand?