If you believe lobbying is a flaw. I'll play devil's advocate to that.
China has to routinely purge extraordinary numbers of people from their political system (tens of thousands), because most of their corruption occurs behind closed doors, shadow dealings, hidden bribes, and so on. Is that better or worse than instead having a strictly defined system of public lobbying? For emphasis I'll point out that the US lobbying system is extremely tightly regulated, there are very well defined laws for it, they will put you in prison if you break those laws.
Systems without US-style open lobbying are not lacking in common corruption, there has always been plenty of that in nations such as Japan, France, Italy, Spain, England, South Korea, China, Russia, Argentina, Venezuela, Mexico, Greece, Poland, South Africa, Indonesia, India, etc.
The world is flooded with political corruption practically everywhere, with most of that world not utilizing a system like US lobbying. It'd be easy to say that one would rather eg AT&T not try to influence politics at all, that's wildly unrealistic as it pertains to human nature and history. So is it better to have a public system that AT&T lobbies in, such that you know where they're lobbying and for how much. And if so, is there a better version of that than the US system (and what would that be).
China has to routinely purge extraordinary numbers of people from their political system (tens of thousands), because most of their corruption occurs behind closed doors, shadow dealings, hidden bribes, and so on. Is that better or worse than instead having a strictly defined system of public lobbying? For emphasis I'll point out that the US lobbying system is extremely tightly regulated, there are very well defined laws for it, they will put you in prison if you break those laws.
Systems without US-style open lobbying are not lacking in common corruption, there has always been plenty of that in nations such as Japan, France, Italy, Spain, England, South Korea, China, Russia, Argentina, Venezuela, Mexico, Greece, Poland, South Africa, Indonesia, India, etc.
The world is flooded with political corruption practically everywhere, with most of that world not utilizing a system like US lobbying. It'd be easy to say that one would rather eg AT&T not try to influence politics at all, that's wildly unrealistic as it pertains to human nature and history. So is it better to have a public system that AT&T lobbies in, such that you know where they're lobbying and for how much. And if so, is there a better version of that than the US system (and what would that be).