Lobbyists, rent seeking and deadweight losses

The rise of lobbying in New Zealand has been in the news recently, as Bryce Edwards explained in his regular Political Roundup column in the New Zealand Herald a couple of weeks ago:

Political lobbying is a growth industry in New Zealand. And lobbyists are going to be particularly busy over the next year.

Edwards charts the rise of 'hyper-partisan' lobby groups Hawker Britton and its right-wing counterpart Barton Deakin. It's an interesting read, along with the many links to other articles embedded within it.

Of course, lobbyists are ultimately being employed by firms that are seeking favourable policy settings. Perhaps they are looking for lighter-handed regulation for themselves, or more regulation of their competitors. Economists refer to this sort of activity as rent-seeking, and in ECON100 and ECON110 I discuss it as one of the key reasons that we might consider monopolies (or firms with market power more generally) to be unfavourable for society. Those firms make large profits, and therefore have a large incentive to use some of those profits to protect their market position through lobbying. If government is seeking to regulate their industry or to open it to more competition (or the firms are worried that the government might contemplate doing so), then those firms will employ lobbyists to dissuade governments from those policies that won't favour the firm.

When I was an undergraduate student, I struggled to see how rent seeking was negative for society. Obviously, it seems ethically problematic. But if you take a general equilibrium framework, then if the firm spends some of its profits on lobbyists, that simply becomes income for the lobbyists, and total welfare remains effectively the same (or maybe it even increases due to the producer surplus in the labour market for lobbyists).

However, that position forgets that the market operates across multiple periods. The firm with market power is generating a deadweight loss (for an explanation of why, see the first part of this earlier post). That deadweight loss arises because the firm with market power is able to price above marginal cost. If the government was to open the market to more competition or to regulate prices, then that would force the price down and increase total welfare in the market. Therefore, if the actions of the lobbyists prevents the regulation or the competition, then it has a cost to society that can be measured by the future deadweight losses that continue to accrue. So, lobbying does potentially have real negative consequences for society, and so as a society we should care about the actions of lobbyists and their interactions with our politicians.