Professional managers are essential for a lot of things. They keep the wheels greased in large companies. But in the more effective companies, they aren't running the show. Ideally, they're handling the "business end" of things without trying to grab the steering wheel. It's not an easy balance to maintain--I know this from bitter experience.

When you bring lobbying into it, it gets even worse. Government lobbying has two main functions in modern times:

One is to use the power of the State to give your company an advantage over competition that it couldn't earn in the market. Licensing and franchise restrictions, government grants, tax breaks applying only to your industry, tax penalties for competitors, no-bid contracts, and trumped-up anti-trust charges against competitors all fall under this category.

The second function is to have a representative in government to keep all the above crap from being pulled on you. The equivalent of paying protection money.

You can see these are not exactly morally equivalent. Many companies, unfortunately, do a bit of both. The issue gets even more morally complex if you have a company whose only major customer is the government.

In "Atlas Shrugged" Hank Rearden employed a lobbyist for the second purpose, but had no interest in the entire thing. Unfortunately, this came back to bite him when his "man in Washington" turned around and became part of his problems. (Ayn Rand intended her novel as an allegory, and of course her characters were idealized.)

Prior to a few years ago, the entire political contribution of multi-billion dollar company Microsoft to politics was about a hundred thousand dollars a year. Bill Gates was about as apolitical as you could get.

He learned that self-defense was needed, the hard way. The contributions are a lot higher, now.