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Notes -
I mean the question is why the tobacco industry, pharma industry, et al haven’t minmaxed their money in politics the way AIPAC has. These are industries very vulnerable to regulation and successful enough that we can assume their lobbying arms are not run by dummies. Yes hard money, soft money, but AIPAC isn’t spending that much.
The pharma industry benefits from regulation because it prevents competition. If a company is large enough before regulation, it can easily use its already-existing compliance department to comply with regulation. If a company wants to lobby, they should lobby for regulations they would find easy to meet but they know their competition will find onerous.
When Amazon realized about 13 years ago that they wouldn't be able to dodge state level sales taxes much longer, they did a whiplash inducing 180 on lobbying and started advocating for a strong detection and enforcement system to make sure that all merchants were unable to avoid the state taxes and launched a new dept. to handle the taxes of merchants who suddenly have to charge sales tax and have no infrastructure for it. Not only are they better positioned to handle the changes, but they also profit off the competition paying them to assuage the impacts of said changes.
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Regulation is often a barrier to entry rather than a full on industry killer. Big incumbent companies like barriers to entry. I think tobacco industry is fine with current levels of regulation.
Pharma companies political control doesn't show up as easily because they just do heavy ad spend on all the news networks.
I think there are heavy limitations to the AIPAC strategy and I laid them out down thread. I don't think it's as much of a killer strategy as Scott implies.
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