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Fabulous article by Cathy Reisenwitz [2] (HT: Arnold Kling [3]), where she explains that corporations seek profit and one way to do that is to influence legislation. What’s interesting to me is how hard it is for some people to absorb this lesson. She does not bring in bootleggers and baptists [4] explicitly but it’s there all the same. My favorite part:
The main thing people fail to understand about money of any shade is that T-Mobile, Toyota, and Visa don’t give to the Center for American Progress despite their calls for greater and more onerous regulation. They give because of their calls for greater and more onerous regulation. And why then do corporations give to Americans for Prosperity, the American Enterprise Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute? Sometimes it’s cheaper to fight the regulation their competitors’ lawyers wrote than to write their own.
Read the whole thing.