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I am not surprised that several here are misconstruing the point others have been making about credit card companies.

There is a difference between excusing profligate morons, which no one here is doing, and illustrating that some credit card policies and practices are indeed predatory and in likely need of reform.

I like the notion that a man's handshake is his bond as much as the next conservative. If that were what was occurring here and deadbeats were the only ones burned, you wouldn't hear a peep from me. Of course, a credit card issuer's "handshake" has about 35 asterisks upon it, many of which are "between the lines," such as tardy processing in order to make the consumer "late."

The easy answer is to cancel the card and pay the balance and tell everyone about the schmucks who played games with the credit card agreement. Perhaps next we should just legalize insider trading, not protest Obama's politically targeted abrogation of Chrysler dealer franchises, and ignore guys like Madoff because of caveat emptor?

Even among ardent capitalists there is a role for the government as the arbiter of the legal bounds of the free market. The same impulse that led to the standardization of weights and measures is still at play here when a credit card issuer attempts to bend over even their most scrupulous customers. Sure, even back in the day, people could say, "Don't deal with Sven because his thumb is on the scale" but that is a half measure compared with throwing Sven's ass in jail, or fining him, and outlawing his misconduct as a cautionary tale for Sven's cheating successors.

The credit card issuers have engaged in systemic misconduct. Many instances are nothing more than blatant abuses of contract law for which most people do not have adequate resources with which to redress on their own in any effective way. The issuers now have the sledgehammer of the state's police power coming down on their heads. So much of what is happening to them could have been avoided merely by their acting with the same sense of honor that most of their best customers clearly have had all along.

That you would say that our position is default liberal and paternalistic says more about you than it does about us. One of the few legitimate aims of a government lay in its police powers. In the opinion of many citizens, card issuers have crossed the line of fair conduct in business and are in need of legal correction. That our reasons for concluding so differs markedly from those of liberals, yet makes for a climate of common cause against the problem, is something that escapes your Manichean view of this issue.