At Cafe Hayek, Don Boudreaux often posts letters he has written to newspapers, but this one to Senator Nelson of Florida is one of the funniest and most biting I have read:
A friend forwarded to me a mass-email that you recently sent to your Florida constituents. In it, you brag about introducing legislation - the "Prepaid Calling Card Consumer Protection Act of 2008" - to "protect" consumers from what you allege to be harmful practices by merchants who sell telephone calling cards.
You identify, as a chief justification for this government intervention, "low barriers to enter the market." How curious.
Low entry barriers means that competition is especially robust. It means that merchants who cheat consumers, or who simply don't offer the best deals possible, will quickly lose customers to rivals who treat consumers better. The only way such competition will fail to work under such circumstances is if the vast majority of consumers in this market are utter imbeciles, unable to detect when they're getting ripped off or too witless to switch to competing suppliers.
Because, by introducing this bill, you show that you obviously regard most Americans to be utter imbeciles, you surely cannot fancy that your election to the Senate is the result of a wise, or even defensible, judgment by Florida voters. These people, after all, are among those whom you regard as incapable of sensibly choosing among competing telephone calling-cards.
If you're correct about the (lack of) intelligence of ordinary Americans, then you and other members of Congress owe your political success only to what you, as revealed by your words and actions, believe to be the intractable stupidity of your fellow citizens - which prompts me to ask: Why should anyone take you seriously?