[danjarch]

Sck5, let me save you the grief and tell you now that people aren't rational. I was predicting this madness 10 years ago when Rooms to Go started to sale cheap furniture at inflated prices and let you go for a year or more with out paying anything. Same goes for rent to own chrome wheels and a whole bunch of other shady deals. Banks handing out credit cards to college students without an income was always a stupid idea in my opinion. Plenty of people more intelligent then me warned against it to, but because it didn't fall apart the next day, people ignored them.

You talk of regulation saving us but another smart fellow predicted where that would lead as far back as two hundred years ago. Apathy to dependence, dependence back to bondage. Take a look around. You'll be suprised and maybe a little scared just how dependent you are on the Government already. FAA look after the airlines, health dept checks up on the food supply, building dept makes sure you home and office is built to code, FDIC covers your bank account, on and on and on.

We're already starting to see more and more rules though. What you can and can't build on your property, what you can serve, who you can serve it to, and how you must serve it in your restuarant. Increasingly if they don't think we the people will accept an out right ban, its slipped through the back door. A punishing tax or limits on who and where it can be sold. Requirements for special permits and areas set off into the hinter lands for those activities.

Your right that to do nothing is insane but placing even more under government control isn't going to help. There are plenty of laws and lawyers to go after all the bad guys for false advertising, professional malfecense, and theft. Passing abunch of new regulations is going to do to banking what our current usery laws do. Instead of up front high interest rates from honest companies that are willing to lend to people with bad credit. We have rent to own scemes, check cashing joints that hit you ten ways from sunday, tittle loans pretty much the same thing, and a host of other shady joints operating at the edges of the law.

I used to get calls once a week with lease your own equiptment scemes. Do you really want to force more and more small businessmen into crazy scemes to get finacing. As well as send more and more investers into shady deals to try to get some return on they're investment.