Dean Baker: The Economic Efficiency Argument for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

Here.  Excerpt:

The basic story is that if it's possible to make lots of money by using deceptive contracts to ripoff consumers, then many very talented and hard-working people will spend their time developing schemes to ripoff consumers. Instead of doing things that contribute to consumers' well-being (e.g. developing better products), these people will be committing resources to redistributing from others to themselves. If the government makes it more difficult to profit from the ripoff route, then people who want to make lots of money will be forced to turn to productive routes instead.

By this logic, weakening the CFPB, and other measures designed to protect consumers, gives more incentives to businesses to design elaborate ripoff schemes.

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