Friday, May 22, 2009

Vote With Your Dollars and congress wont need to Regulate Creditors

While Credit Card Reform is being widely accepted in most venues, thanks to Sen. Coburn from Oklahoma, I find a fundamental flaw in the logic that congress has to regulate any sort of trade. I would like for a moment to examine the idea of "The Invisible Hand" and go a step further than Adam Smith. I believe that in order for his economic ideas to prosper, they must be bestowed on a moral and responsible people. These people cannot remain idle while their monetary resources are stripped from them little by little.
The Federal legislators have done the job that the people should have done all along. The idea of the "Invisible Hand" states that the consumer and consumer practices would dictate the path of the Economy and the types of businesses that are allowed to flourish. This latest bill now prohibits retroactive interest rate hikes and targeting college students without parental consent.
However, these practices and other predatory processes that the new law prohibits (being that it was signed only hours ago) should never have been common place. If this law had been passed with Adam Smith's theories in mind they would simply allow for the nonpayment of such erroneous fees without legal recourse for the offending company.
Receiving a bill with charges unincured by the consumer would mandate that the consumer lodge a complain and demand that the charges be removed, when they are not, the bill will go unpaid and the consumer would take his or her business elsewhere. This type of action repeated over time would either drive the irreputable companies out of business or force them to follow a moral business model to keep from bankruptcy.
I use for example title and payday loan privateers, while many owners of such enterprise have made thousands while praying on unsuspecting customers who had fallen on hard times, here in the Marion and Polk counties of Oregon they have become extinct. There is simply no business for them here due to the lack of consumers ignorant enough to do business with them. Here as in any places reputation is what drives commerce, a bad repute will drive a business off the cliff within a few short years.
This however would not resolve predatory "phishing" a practice that uses the unknowing consumers ignorance to extract fees that were agreed to. This can only be solved thru fiscal education. There is only one point the government should regulate concerning college students and credit card companies; They should require a curriculum approved by the school board that educates high school and college students on budgeting and financial responsibility. This would also open the door for small business to sell their curriculum to the school districts.
While I happily concede that this bill was a great victory for our second amendment rights, I can only hope that bills of that nature will pass without being slipped between sheets of paper to hope that they go generally unnoticed or that others will sign the bill to avoid political downfall.
I write so that the general public may be informed and take hold of our country.

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