For me, when you start to lobby, when you explicitly pay people to pass laws in your favour, that's when you cross a line. You go from playing within the rules of the system to making up rules that favour you, and it's wild that it's legal much less acceptable for corporations to do that.
While I agree it is unfair and it would be better if they didn’t, the reality is that there is a meta-game at a higher level and they are playing according to the meta-game rules. Part of the meta-game is to convince others to stay in the regular game sandbox which gives rise to the hypocrisy we are all familiar with. I don’t know what it would take to diminish the meta-gaming let alone eliminate it, it’s very hard to stop things that are very profitable. I also think we’re in the looting phase of corporatocracy. I think the result of this means the meta-gaming rapidly grows like a cancer to take over everything.
Personally, I think we need much tighter regulation. There was a study at some point that found that lobyying has a yield of 22,000% in the US, which is a wild figure (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1375082). Lobbying very seriously undermines democracy. The US system of calling lobbying via donations as free speech seems ludicrous. France, for instance, has much tighter laws on lobbying.
