The most dangerous lobbying groups and special interests in America may be the ones no one talks about.
When Americans criticize special interests, they usually aim at the obvious targets: Big Tech, the defense industrial complex, and other large institutions that appear to benefit themselves at everyone else’s expense. There is often good reason for to target these groups. They wield enormous influence in Washington and state capitals, and they regularly use it to secure favorable regulations, subsidies, or protections from competition.
But most Americans focus on only one side of the economic equation, and oftentimes the easiest: producers. They see companies, executives, and industries, and the harm those interests can cause when they capture government. However, far less attention goes to the groups that claim to speak for workers or consumers. In fact, they are often more successful precisely because their agenda comes wrapped in supposed virtue. It is much easier to sell a policy that helps “the worker” or “the consumer” even if it comes at everyone else’s expense, than one that openly benefits a corporation. Invoke workers or consumers, and suddenly self-interest is simply an act of public service.
Let’s take price controls as an example, as many consumer protection groups often back and support them. Despite what many people may think, the appetite for them extends well beyond the Democrat Party. A recent CBS News poll found that 75 percent of Democrats, 62 percent of independents, and even 54 percent of Republicans support government-imposed limits on prices. The logic is seductively simple. If we force prices to stay low, then issues revolving around affordability are easily solved.
Of course that isn't true. Price controls only benefit the consumer lucky enough to obtain a product at the mandated price, but they do so at the expense of everyone else. Businesses that cannot cover their costs, landlords who rely on rental income, and developers who decide it is no longer worth building more housing. You do not create affordability by pretending scarcity does not exist; you just create shortages and call them compassion.
Unions offer another clear example. While most Americans complain about monopolies in industry, few ever complain about the monopoly power wielded by groups such as the American Federation of Teachers. The union has the ability to damage a company like Target through a boycott because of its enormous membership and the money its members’ pension funds have invested in the company’s stock. And like any other self-interested corporation, teachers' unions are not primarily concerned with improving the product they provide, the education of children. Their priority is protecting their bottom line. Maximizing pay and benefits for members while minimizing the demands placed on them. The only difference is that corporations are condemned for acting in their own interest; unions are often praised for it.
Or take the National Association of Realtors, which backs zoning restrictions and barriers to construction routinely defended as measures to “protect neighborhood character,” preserve property values, and safeguard local residents. But those protections are often among the primary drivers of rising housing costs and the broader affordability crisis. By making it harder to build new homes, they constrain supply and keep prices artificially high, empowering existing homeowners and real-estate interests while pricing prospective buyers and renters out of the market.
Perhaps the most powerful special interest Americans rarely think of as a special interest is the hospital industry, through certificate-of-need laws. These laws are sold as a way to protect patients and control healthcare costs by preventing what regulators describe as unnecessary duplication of medical services and facilities. In practice, however, they often allow existing hospitals to challenge the construction of a new hospital, clinic, or surgery center, the equivalent of letting a McDonald’s vote on whether a Burger King can open across the street. The result is less competition, fewer choices, and higher prices, all in the name of protecting the consumer.
This pattern is not unique; it is commonplace. It has become a normal strategy for special interests of every kind. Wrap self-interest in the language of helping workers, consumers, patients, or communities, and most Americans will either actively support it or simply not care enough to object. Meanwhile, the companies that actually make everyday life better through widely available products and services, from technology to retail to logistics, receive the bulk of the public’s anger.
If we want to understand why socialism has become more popular, or why command-style economics is now finding support even on the right, this is why. We direct our frustration, political energy, and government power at the most productive parts of the economy, while ignoring the interests that most effectively disguise their own self-dealing as virtue.
We have forgotten the lesson taught by titanic conservatives like Milton Friedman. That the answer to most of society’s problems is not to place ever more faith in a regulatory state that claims to act in the public interest. It is to embrace the chaos, competition, and invisible hand of the free market.
When free markets reemerge as a foundational pillar of conservatism, when they become the lens through which conservatives view the world, we will gain far greater clarity about the problems plaguing society. We will recognize that many policies sold as compassion are simply another form of special-interest politics, and that the path to prosperity lies not in government control, but in the freedom to build, compete, and succeed without being encumbered by those who seek to rig the rules in their own favor.
Many laws are passed in the name of “protecting consumers.” Milton Friedman explains what such legislation really amounts to:
— Milton Friedman Quotes (@MiltonFriedmanW) August 31, 2026
“Most consumer protection legislation is not consumer protection legislation. It’s the enacting into the laws of the prejudices of a small group of… pic.twitter.com/E2TZAZbOJ2
