It’s tough to be a lobbyist these days, baby. It’s not all capture and vote-buying as the populists would have you believe. As Kimberly Strassel writes in today's Opinion Journal, politicians have no reason not to use what leverage they do have back against you.

As most of Washington met last week to fret over the economy, Harry Reid was attending a less-noticed summit. The Senate majority leader had summoned the titans of more than a dozen industry trade groups to a Capitol Hill meeting, where he delivered a crisp message: Get with our program, or get demolished.

[...]

In private, and public, Democrats are telling companies they're frustrated with what they view as too slow a shift in the political makeup of lobby shops. New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez recently quipped that if companies didn't start sending friendlier faces, they might find it "a little difficult at the end of the day for them to achieve the success they want." North Dakota's Byron Dorgan (who apparently has read the ethics law) clarified: "It's not about how many Democrats are hired. It's about how they weigh in on issues."

Mr. Reid stepped up the pressure with last week's pow-wow. Democrats invited only presidents and CEOs of the most powerful trade groups, hoping to circumvent GOP lobbyists and take their message straight to the top. That message? According to one participant, the meeting was cordial, but the theme clear: "We have a narrow margin right now, and it is tough for us to get anything done. But there will be more of us next year, you'd better get used to it, and you better find a way to work with us."

It’s called “rent extraction” in the public choice literature. Fred McChesney did most of the work on it, culminating in his 1997 book, Money for Nothing. A variant of rent extraction is so-called “milker bills,” where legislators “float” a regulatory proposal that would harm industry or firm X, who is supposed to get the hint that a few extra campaign dollars could help get the proposed bill onto the back burner. Another variant is so-called tax farming, where the politicians play nice with tax base X while finding indirect ways to tax them. One indirect mechanism that’s become increasingly popular in recent decades is tort law. Take big tobacco, for example. Most of the monies that states have collected under the $246 billion master settlement have simply substituted for general tax dollars. A New York Times study did some of the bean counting, and found that 95 percent has gone to fund public works projects or property and sales tax relief. On this point, Jeffrey Haymond has a chapter in my forthcoming book, Law without Romance, titled "Class Action Rent Extraction." Torts, of course, are a kind of hidden broad-based tax. The Council of Economic Advisors in 2002 estimated the annual “tort tax” (higher prices imposed by business sector to cover costs of litigation) at nearly $200 billion. These lobbyist shenanigans—the K Street Project—aren’t much different.

So from a public choice perspective, the so-called "K Street Project Part Blue" isn't much of a shock at all. Sure, it is vaguely sordid to see pols strong-arm the hiring decisions of Big Lobby. But the article misses the larger point that rent seeking is socially costly in the first place, and rent extraction only furthers and compounds those losses.

Thanks to Richard Reinsch for the pointer.