Caught Between a soul in every stone unturned under the inexhorable Goldman's Sack

[David Morris]

http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2010/05/summers-on-consumer-protection.php

Summers on Consumer Protection

I know Larry Summers likes to devour working people for breakfast in
order to amuse his dark Wall Street paymasters, but his reply to
Michael Bloomberg about why you need real consumer financial
protection authority and not just “financial literacy” education seems
pretty smart:

We don’t allow you to sell baby seats that are unsafe for babies. We
don’t allow you to sell baby seats that look good, but that have 20
pages of print that say ‘by the way, it’s not safe’…I don’t see the
problem with some regulation that actually goes to the content of the
product.

Disclosure and literacy are both good things. But you do have to step
back and ask yourself what’s good about them. They could be good
because they’re tools to help people avoid scam products. Or they
could be good because they’re pretexts to avoid banning scams. If
you’re interested in them for non-pretextual reasons, though, then
you’ll see that a certain amount of scam-banning is necessary and
appropriate to advance the very same goals that are advanced through
literacy and disclosure