There’s a famous line in the movie “The Graduate” where a young Dustin Hoffman receives this bit of career advice from a businessman: “One word, Benjamin: plastics.”

He wasn’t talking about credit cards, but he might as well have been. Back in the 1960s only about 30% of Americans had credit cards. Today more than 80% of us do.  It’s what I call the democratization of credit.

This revolution in the way we pay for things benefits everyone: shoppers, retailers, online companies, banks, record keepers, and so on.

It’s no exaggeration to say that credit cards are the grease that make the great American economic engine run smoothly.

Today, we increasingly tap our phones at the check-out lines, rather than swipe the plastic card.   All told one of every three consumer purchases today are with credit cards. I’ve noticed lately that stores now have signs that read: “Sorry, we don’t take cash.”

But now some politicians in Washington won’t leave well enough alone. In order to make things “more affordable,” they want to impose price controls on how much the credit card companies charge merchants.  Even worse,........

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