Lawmakers justify industry-serving votes using market-virtue rationalizations

Evidence

The magnitude of the economic crisis shattered faith in the heralded self-corrective power of the free market. But it did not diminish the efforts of Wall Street to water down legislative regulatory initiatives designed to rein in the financial industry. Despite the disastrous human consequences and the urgent need for reforms, efforts to enact financial regulations met with stiff opposition. Corporate executives and legions of lobbyists for the financial industry fought vigorously to defeat regulation of their financial practices. A united partisan group of lawmakers, some of whom received disproportionately large contributions to their reelection campaigns shortly before the vote on the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, joined the financial lobbyists in opposing the bill (Lipton & Lichtblau, 2010). They justified their votes on the grounds that regulations would cripple the economy; stifle job growth, expand the government’s costly, obstructive bureaucracies; undermine international competitiveness; and distort the self-correcting power of the free-market system (Dennis, 2010). — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1523

Categorization

• XREF: The marketplace-rhetoric moral justification maps onto Cooper’s social-conservatism argument about how ideological frames rationalize policy. — connects to: Road-construction politicians profited by trading approval votes for advance route knowledge — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 912
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1523