John Edwards thinks so:

CLEVELAND - Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, on an eight-state swing to highlight poverty issues, on Tuesday called for a national law to crackdown on predatory lending.

Walking through a struggling neighborhood in Cleveland, the nation’s poorest big city, Edwards said that without national regulations predatory lenders who offer higher-priced loans to people with tarnished credit or low incomes “just move to another place where they are not regulated.”

Bart Hinkle hit on this subject today, and I think he made a pretty good point about letting people be responsible for their own actions.

He uses the example of newly-instituted “abusive driving” fines in Virginia.  Basically, if you’re caught driving in such a way that endangers other people on the road (like 20mph over the speed limit, or without insurance, etc.) you can get fined thousands of dollars.  Bart notes that such a fine could put a lot of working class people in dire financial straits.  The same sort of dire financial straits people find themselves in when they choose to live beyond their means and facilitate that lifestyle with bridge loans.

In the first instance most would say that the person receiving the fine is suffering the consequences of their actions in not following traffic laws.  Yet in the second instance the people getting the payday loans are cast as victims.  As if the decision to get the loan in the first place weren’t theirs to make.

Personally, I don’t think it’s fair to punish money lenders (as unscrupulous as they may be) for the poor financial choices of their clients.