A genuine alternative is to be able take your custom to one of the MANY other providers who aren't forcing you agree to conditions that are ridiculous. As soon

A genuine alternative is to be able take your custom to one of the MANY other providers who aren't forcing you agree to conditions that are ridiculous. As soon as there is no alternative it's an industry cartel and we need to look at regulating. What is appropriate to determine credit worthiness? How about a blood sample? How much melanin do you have? Who did you vote for and we'll need that verified with a photo of your ballot. There's a million more totally unreasonable ways of determining your credit worthiness, some legal, some not but should be and you would choose not to submit if you could. You have agree to pay interest, on time and pay the loan back. -- ok that's not something you can reasonably opt out of and hope to get a loan. You have to agree to to have your life ruined on a whim or by incompetence because you borrowed $1k and paid it back in full with the interest? -- no, definitely not ok. In between the extremes are all the cases that need looking at. This is a standard case of market failure where you as a consumer have zero market power to effect your preference and your preference is more than reasonable. The GFC was one occasion where such a market failure really came home to roost. There are others, some are trivial, some are huge, most in between. Where it can ruin your life, utterly needlessly and the lives of others, possibly systemically across the whole economy, we tend to want to regulate it so that doesn't happen. There are many such examples in finance which is why we have regulated it in so many ways for so long. Sometimes the regulation will be effective, sometimes not, sometimes it will be fair, sometimes not, sometimes it will be captured by the powerful, hopefully mostly not. Without it, eh, we head for some big trouble, at worst class and civil warfare. (Separate but somewhat related note: "You need to agree to all future changes to this contract by your counter-party in all circumstances" - OH HELL NO that's not ok and should not be considered remotely legal, yet there it is in every single click through you've ever bothered to read and fail to understand on the internet because the click throughs (not contracts for mine) are simply not capable of being understood without the assistance of layers of courts, lawyers and judges - the law on them is not settled anywhere on earth as far as I'm aware. Unconscionable conduct in such things is the norm, pretending otherwise is silly no matter how libertarian I want to be about it and life in general.)