Here. This has been up since December, but I only just saw it. It offers a perspective from an economist. An excerpt:
I can see three principles that can justify consumer financial protection beyond simple contract enforcement:
Duping people is fraud even if they wouldn’t have been duped had they had infinite time and infinite intelligence. * * *
Facilitating gain for oneself and harm to others by taking advantage of preexisting confusion is predation of those who are especially vulnerable. * * *
It is legitimate to protect time-slices of people from serious injury by other time-slices of people. * * *
Other than the possible issue of almost unfireable regional Fed Presidents who have not been confirmed by the Senate voting on monetary policy, the Fed has passed US constitutional muster. So it seems possible that the CFPB could be governed in a similar way without being unconstitutional. The [PHH case] suggests that if only the Chair of the Fed could vote, the Fed would be unconstitutional too. If that is, so, there could be more people appointed to govern the CFPB, just like the Fed. But in practice, the way the Fed is governed seems quite different in practice from the usual bipartisan board for government agencies.
