Permit me to introduce a new axiom into contemporary American politics: if Dick Durbin and J.D. Vance are on the same side of an issue, it can’t be a good idea.

Vance is one of that emerging breed of isolationist, protectionist, anti-bank, anti-Wall Street Republican somehow considered the “conservative” wing of the party. In any case, his membership in this upstart populist sect goes a long way to explaining why he is joining Sen. Durbin — whose disdain for entrepreneurial success is well-established throughout a long career — on a bill imposing price controls on credit cards. If memory serves, Richard Nixon was the last Republican to make this sort of economic mistake, which just goes to prove if you hang around this business long enough everything comes back around.

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The Credit Card Competition Act is the title of the Durbin-Vance joint effort. Like most bill titles these days, it is a crafty bit of terminological legerdemain, describing a bill to deliver pretty much the exact opposite of the effect implied by the title.

Currently, when one buys something with a credit card, that transaction is routed through the card’s network — most commonly Visa or Mastercard — and the retailer pays what’s known as an “interchange fee” for the privilege of being able to accept credit card payments. That fee goes to pay for all things related to managing those credit card payments — processing the transaction, providing back-end security, offering rewards points and so forth. No free lunch, as Milton Friedman liked to say.

Durbin and Vance would like to believe Milton was wrong. Their bill mandates multiple network routing — meaning instead of the transaction simply being routed through the card issuers network, the retailer must now be given the option of selecting from at least two networks, only one of which can be either Visa or Mastercard. This alternative network could be Discover or American Express, but could just as well be any of a number of small, fly-by-night debit card issuers who, without the help of Uncle Sam, can’t make it in the big leagues. Naturally, these little companies don’t have much overhead in the form of back-end security, reward miles or customer service, so they can charge substantially lower interchange fees. Since the retailer will get to choose which network to use, the effect is to ratchet those fees down.

This looks lovely on paper, but like most central-planning schemes it falls apart in practice. Interchange fees are not in place simply because they can be — unlike the taxes masquerading as fees the state legislature imposes through enterprises, these fees reflect the real-world costs associated with credit cards (processing, security, perks). Absent government intervention, interchange fees are subject to the same pressures as other prices. By injecting itself into the transaction, the state, by mandating the multiple routing, is effectively setting that price artificially low. That, of course, means those things interchange fees are supposed to pay for suddenly can’t be paid for.

So what will this mean in practice? Well, processing transactions is not optional. The obvious low hanging fruit that will need to be sacrificed in the name of forced artificial “competition” will be, at the most aggravating, the loss of credit card rewards like airline miles; or, at the most dangerous, corners cut in back-end security.

The risk of losing miles, points and other rewards is not hyperbolic. Remember debit card rewards? Free checking — that sort of thing? Those don’t exist any longer because Sen. Durbin traveled this road back in 2010, stapling to the Dodd-Frank Act his eponymous amendment which pulled the same routing sleight-of-hand on debit card issuers as he and his new MAGA buddy now wish to do with credit cards.

The corollary to the cliché of the government picking winners and losers is that there will, in fact, be winners and losers. The winners here will be the biggest retailers — Walmart, Target, et al — who will now have the government to negotiate part of the cost of doing business for them.

The real losers will be consumers who use credit card rewards, and the businesses that rely on their use — largely tourism-based companies like airlines, hotels, ski resorts and the businesses that survive off them — even the folks who rent out property in places like Vail and Granby.

There may be a bright side to losing your points, however; you can use the time that would otherwise be wasted planning trips and taking the kids on holiday to reflect on what life is like when Washington passes legislation that only harms the people they are supposed to represent at home.

Kelly Sloan is a political and public affairs consultant and a recovering journalist based in Denver.