A modest proposal

Larry Ribstein surveys the ever-encroaching regulatory state and proposes a deal:

The most stringent laws should protect only the most weak-brained citizens. Everybody must apply for a license to shop. Those who score highest on a battery of financial and consumer literacy tests can shop at any store. Lower scorers would have to shop at the safest, government-approved stores, or where Elizabeth Warren shops.

Dunces who fail the test could shop only at government commissaries where approved firms and government agencies sell their wares, prices are regulated, and every deal is completely fair. These stores would have to meet the same high standards as, say, the Internal Revenue Service.

He concedes, however, that another option exists:

There is another, even more radical, alternative. We could shed the notion that markets must be perfect in order to be good. We could wonder whether the people who make consumer-protection laws really know so much more that we do. We could ask if politicians and bureaucrats really have our interests at heart.

In the end, we might find that free markets are worse than everything but the alternatives.

Amen. The best consumer protection one can find is the competition of the marketplace, which provides a far better check on greed and malicious behavior than any government program or politician.