Mamas don't let your babies grow up to be lobbyists!

Gerald Cassidy lobbied to insert $27 million into a Dept of Ag appropriations bill to build and operate a nutrition center at Tufts University back in 1978. He and his firm instantly became the lobbying darling of a number of other universities, then private businesses. By 2006, Cassidy and Associates was raking in $26 million a year (as reported in Luigi Zingales's A Capitalism for the People). Gerald's reported net worth in 2007 was $125 million.

Not in Ma and Pa Cassidy's wildest dreams could they have imagined that their boy would have become such a phenomenally successful consultant thief. By 2006 the firm had cost the U.S. taxpayer tens of billions of dollars in pork-barrel projects it helped pass through Congress. Lord only knows the economic cost of all that misallocation of resources.

This is in no way hyperbole folks. The above represents no less than legalized rustling of consumer capital. And make no mistake; the larger the government, the more the opportunity for special interests to collude with the politician, and the more the mamas who'll want their babies to grow up to be lobbyists...

The lobby industry's total annual revenue in 1975 was $100 million - by 2011 its take was $3.3 billion. Wow (although that's down from 3.5 billion in 2010)! Think what all that money, cumulatively over the years, might have accomplished in the R&D departments of the companies who hired those guns. What a waste!