Na, I'm with you on the money thing. Lobbyists are just a symptom of the winner-take-all economic system we've got here. That said, it's probably more realistic to control the symptoms right now than try to reform our entire economy.

You could probably answer every question with "People in power use their fortunes to preserve power" and you'd nail it 90% of the time.

I'd say instead that it was a symptom of the money-controls-resources economic system.

Basically, thought experiment: imagine a population where everyone starts with a fixed N dollars. Random-walk each dollar a few iterations and you end up with a bell curve of money distribution. Now start again and instead of random-walking them, apply a probabilistic walk, where having more dollars makes you a proportionately more likely recipient. You end up with a skewed distribution with a few rich controlling most of the resources. Now imagine being a congress-critter in that skewed world. Who are you going to have to cut deals with? And you can make the rich-get-richer rule steeper now, because the dollar-owners are cutting deals to make dollar-taking easier. And now your wealth distribution looks like the real world.

The answer is simply that money itself, the alienable control of resources, is the cause. In a society organized by money, corruption and misrule will result. Any "symptom control" amounts to pumping the distribution flatter - it's a sisyphean task, structurally opposed to the power that money creates, and hence metastable at best.