The American Enterprise Institute’s Peter Wallison has a nice piece in today’s Washington Post. Wallison rightfully argues against treating ordinary Americans like idiots who can’t decide for themselves what’s good for them.

Conservatives have always argued that liberals are elitists who do not respect ordinary Americans; this legislation seems to prove it. For example, the administration’s plan would allow the educated and sophisticated elites to have access to whatever financial services they want but limit the range of products available to ordinary Americans.
This unprecedented result comes about because, under the proposed legislation, every provider of a financial service (a term that includes organizations as varied as banks, check-cashing services, leasing companies and payment services) is required to offer a “standard” product or service — to be defined and approved by the proposed agency — that will be simple and entail “lower risks” for consumers. These standard products are called “plain vanilla” in the white paper that the administration circulated in advance of the legislation.

On that point, George Mason University and Cafe Hayek’s Don Boudreaux makes this really great comment:

But let’s accept, for argument’s sake, the administration’s judgment that ordinary Americans can’t adequately assess complexity. Doesn’t it then follow that Americans’ election of Mr. Obama to high office deserves no credit? After all, isn’t the task of assessing the merit of one person’s ideas on economics, foreign affairs, ethics, law, and other difficult topics extraordinarily complex? Given that Joe Six-Pack and Jane Soap-Opera cannot be trusted with the relatively straightforward task of sensibly investing their own money, how can they be trusted to meet the far more complex challenge of choosing powerful national leaders?

Read the whole thing here.