It would be like building another Margaritaville, right there on the state Capitol grounds.

Lobbyists charged their clients $127 million last year to hobnob with state legislators, according to the Associated Press. It’s an astounding sum for such an abstract pursuit — $11 million more than the influence peddlers collected the previous year. For what? Talking? Partying? Contributing to campaigns and PACs and “leadership funds”?

For comparison’s sake, just to give you something concrete to contemplate, $127 million is about what you’d need to duplicate the Margaritaville Resort that Jimmy Buffett is building on Hollywood Beach.

Imagine that. If the corporations and trade associations and unions and local governments had pooled the fees they paid to lobbyists last year, they could have lavished our legislators with a 17-story hotel with 349 rooms, with seven restaurants, bars, a spa, retail shops, a lagoon pool and a “Flo Rider” wave machine so our lawmakers could go simulated surfing.To be fair, we ought to add another floor to our hypothetical Margaritaville for a casino, given that gambling outfits last year (and this) have been buying up influence peddlers like Momma at the outlet mall. The Malaysian-based Genting spent $760,000 and the Sands out of Vegas threw in another $551,000.

Genting and Sands failed to get their way, of course. The destination casinos bills didn’t pass. That failure might have been reassuring to anyone worried that influence money has trumped the democratic process. See? Our democracy’s not for sale. Except that the Seminole Indians and the racinos and Walt Disney World and the Florida Chamber of Commerce, all interested in snuffing out the competition from the gambling giants, were paying their own army of lobbyists to kill destination casinos. (The Seminoles alone spent $420,000.)

Maybe the Florida Baptist Convention, with their own forlorn lobbyist fighting the gambling proposal, might want to think that righteousness finally prevailed over big money in Tallahassee. Truth is, big money canceled out another source of big money.

Instead of a democratic society, we’re building a big, fancy plutocracy. Everyone knows that next year, or the year after, after the lobbyists milk a few more millions out of competing gambling interests, bigger money will finally trump the merely big money.

The GEO Group out of Boca Raton similarly spent $645,000 on lobbyists on another failed endeavor, trying to convince key legislators to privatize state prison operations in 18 southern Florida counties. But wait until next year. GEO will spend few more hundred thousand for lobbyists, for a few more hundred thousand in campaign contributions. It’s the way of the new plutocracy. Optimize the money. String ‘em along.

The Associated Press reported that AT&T was the single biggest spender on lobbyists in 2011. The company’s $1.68 million wasn’t frittered away for nothing. The Legislature deregulated telephone landlines. Dosal Tobacco spent $800,000 and managed to fend off legislation to do away with the company’s lucrative tax exemptions.

About 10 percent of the lobbying fees come from local governments — most of that from Broward and Miami-Dade city and county commissions. Certainly, South Florida hasn’t gotten much return on its investment in Tallahassee. Except that much of that money gets kicked back to individual commissioners in the form of campaign contributions. Those fees are less about legislation than re-election.

Lobbyists were first required to disclose their fees in 2006. Everyone was stunned that year when the fee total came to at least $58 million. Former Senate President Tom Lee, the Brandon Republican who pushed the disclosure law through, over the howls of the Florida Professional Association of Lobbyists, called the first reports “excellent evidence that fewer and fewer business interests and people feel comfortable about affecting the outcome without a hired gun.”

Lee added, “I think it’s a sad testimony about where our democracy is headed.”

With the lobbying fees up to $127 million, now we know where our democracy has gone. To a plutocracy.