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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (66520)	9/2/2004 4:25:25 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793963

The pointed references about lawyers last night had a good basis. Lawyers Lean Left By Steve Bainbridge on Current Affairs When the bad guys of campaign finance are reeled off, the list usually starts with oil companies and then maybe proceeds to pharmaceutical firms. In fact, however, there is an industry that dwarfs them both: Today's most aggressive election donors by far are lawyers. As of July, law partners had donated $112 million to 2004 political candidates; by comparison, the entire oil and gas industry donated only $15 million. And wealthy lawyers now tilt strongly Democratic: 71% of their money goes to Democrats, only 29% to Republicans. (WSJ$) Neither the size of lawyer contributions nor their tilt to the left should surprise anyone. The business of government is producing laws and regulations. Unlike most industries, for whom new regulations can sometimes be a benefit or a cost, lawyers virtually always benefit from new laws and regulations. A new source of liability creates work not just for plaintiffs lawyers, for example, but also defense lawyers. Likewise, it also creates work for transactional lawyers, whose job is advising clients on how to evade or, at least, live with the new rules. Finally, because so much lobbying work is done by lawyers, they can even capture revenues if a new law fails to pass. The benefits to lawyers of new laws and regulations are magnified by the impact of licensing requirements. You can't practice law without being admitted to a state bar. As a result, lawyers exercise a monopoly on litigation and much advisory work. Accordingly, new laws and regulations generate monopolistic profits ("rents") for lawyers. This gives lawyers a huge stake in influencing the legislative and executive processes. Finally, although I think this is only a partial explanation for the leftward tilt in lawyer contributions, you would expect lawyers to favor the party of big government (more laws = more profits). All of which suggests that one way of cleaning up campaign finance would be to make government itself smaller.