I'm researching lobbying from a economic perspective.
A simplified example: Concrete companies lobbied to take Adobe Bricks (A much cheaper building material) out of the competition. As a result, Americans have built inferior houses at inflated prices for many years.
(My numbers are rough and I'll skip the details, Hypothetically, if not for lobbying, I'd expect the average home price to be at least 20% cheaper. If we're really conservative and call the average house to be $100,000 – multiply that by 125 million houses in America we'd have a value of over 10 trillion. 20% in damages would be 2 Trillion – and if we were to distribute that to every American we'd each get around $6000 each. In other words, if we consider the legislation that directly prevents us from using the best materials available to us as theft – then we'd each be owed $6000.
But Disclaimer: Know that the 'actual' math would be much more complicated. For one, a bare-bones home made with these cheaper materials would cost about 50% less than a similarly made bare-bones home made using more expensive alternatives like lumber and concrete. If we make it into a fairly modern home and add in the basic luxuries practically no American can live without, this difference in cost goes from 50% down to roughly 30%. If you want a really luxurious house, the difference in cost pretty much disappears. – Again, just rough estimates that could certainly be far off if I happen to have overlooked something blatant.
And setting all that aside, there are 'tons' of other 'lobbying' that have impacted home prices – most of which would also increase housing prices – though some regulations definitely exist mostly for more positive reasons. But many regulations exist solely to make it harder for people to compete with companies already in the industry.)
Likewise, similar things happen in practically every industry that exists in America. I think it'd be really satisfying if I could see a breakdown of every industry – and the cash value they've effectively stolen from each American. More-so if we could name the individuals involved in the passing of each relevant legislation.
That said: While I will certainly continue doing research on my own, I also wanted to look into if there have already been any sorts of studies – or existing data-sets that could be useful for this research.
Works like this exist
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0176268098000172
^Which is a paper a paper talking about… Simplified – Effectively 'wealth spillage' – It's an idea, whereas a person lobbies the government for their own financial benefit – and through their profit, some of that money will 'spill over' into the economy and benefits everyone.
It's obviously a real thing – you can relate it to innovation. You discover a new thing, get rich over it, while benefiting everyone by giving them access to new technology. The difference being in the margins. With 'innovation' you often increase 'everyone's' ability to generate wealth, through saving them time or improving their ability to produce things on their own – Lobbying is of course different in this respect – as in many cases lobbying can reduce the general public's ability to produce.
Anyway, I've been browsing for more data or research papers, but it seems pretty rare to find something even vaguely related to what I want – Granted, I'm sure I'll have more luck should I narrow my scope (Such as to focus on specific legislation) – But even that can sometimes be hard to narrow down on – like "What specific legislation enabled this or that". (I'm sure trying to do a full breakdown on healthcare would be a nightmare, especially how frequently changes are made in that industry.
Are there any studies or academic papers on the economic impacts of malicious lobbying?
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