Warren’s Consumer ‘Protection’ Agency Sets Dangerous Precedent

The Hill discusses the CFPB’s arbitration rule with John Berlau.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren‘s government-run-wild brain child is continuing its left-wing sprint into the Trump era, and only Congress can stop its usurpations.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the agency created by then-Harvard law professor Warren in the Obama years, effectively to enact liberal policies without new legislation or executive branch oversight, has issued a new rule that is the essence of lawmaking by regulation, something the Founding Fathers attempted to prevent through the Constitution’s design.

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This is problematic on many fronts. First, call me old fashioned, but I still believe adults are perfectly well-equipped to enter contracts with one another without the government deciding the terms aren’t good enough for one party or the other.

Secondly, the CFPB’s own 2015 study found that arbitration is actually beneficial to consumers. The agency’s “own findings show that arbitration is relatively fair and successful at resolving a range of disputes … and that regulatory efforts to limit the use of arbitration will likely leave consumers worse off,” comment Jason Johnston of the University of Virginia Law School and Todd Zywicki of the Scalia Law School in a recent study about the CFPB.

This matches the research on the topic, which has shown arbitration “more often compensates consumers for damages faster and grants them larger awards than do class action lawsuits,” in the words of John Berlau of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Read the full article at The Hill.