IT'S FOR YOUR OWN GOOD.

Adam Smith was famously skeptical about affecting to trade for the public good.  That doesn't stop people from so doing.

[T]here’s always a good reason to take your freedom away — your health, the poor, your evil opinions, the lousy way you raise your kids — and never a reason to preserve freedom except the love of freedom itself. Thus, so often, the people destroying the American way of life are actually nice people who just want to help.

Never mind that the reform being so proposed imposes constraints that might preclude subsequent improvements on the way people do things from taking place, or create incentives for people to opt out of what is being done for their own good.

The conversation of the hour is about mandatory purchases of health insurance, but there is accumulating evidence that mandatory separation of commercial from investment banking, and mandatory deposit insurance, contribute to the instability of the financial services.