What goes around comes around. If Ed Milliband's declaration of war on "rip-off Britain" sounds strangely familiar, that's because it is.
Labour waged a similar campaign on the "surcharge culture" in the run up to its election victory of 1997, and then continued to castigate the private sector for "rip-off" practices throughout much of its first term.
Radical consumerism became the new socialism, with big bad business said to be hell bent on exploiting the worker not so much through low wages as unjustified prices and charges.
Little progress in correcting the problem did it make too, judging by the present state of play. Still, if it worked once in winning votes, Mr Milliband figures, then maybe it can help again.
No one doubts the problem's severity. Business behaviour that can be characterised as chiselling and skimming remains rife in many areas of the economy. Almost everyone will have had direct experience of unreasonable and untransparent pricing, or else fallen victim to the perils of inertia, where to rest for one moment with an apparently trustworthy supplier will leave you taken for granted and overcharged.
There can be few better examples of such market failure than financial services a veritable travelling circus of snake-oil salesmen and carpetbaggers.
Never mind the costs of the banking crisis, foisted by the industry on to the public balance sheet, underlying charges, as opposed to the ones that are disclosed, for even the most basic of financial transactions seem routinely to be off the scale. This is an industry for whose mysteries and obfuscations the term "complex monopoly" was almost invented.
Hargreaves Lansdowne, one of Britain's biggest retailers of investment products, is a fine firm for which many customers have good reason to be grateful, but it is no accident that its shares trade on such a high earnings multiple. The group's operating margin last year was nearly 60pc. That compares with just 8pc for Tesco (LSE: TSCO.L - news) and just over 3pc for Costco.
Wherever finance is involved, it's as well to check your wallet after leaving the room. One example often cited by Terry Smith, the financier who recently set up his own fund in an attempt to counter these practices, is the explosive growth of "exchange traded funds".
These tracking devices are an accident waiting to happen but they have proved popular, in part because they appear to be so low cost, with relatively small management charges. Strange, then, that for the banks that sponsor them, they are one of the most profitable products on the market.
This is because on top of the management charge, banks will also be charging for producing and selling the derivatives on which the fund is based. Custodial fees, charges for leverage and so on, all get piled on top.
Performance-related fees, common in the hedge fund and private equity sectors, are the biggest iniquity of the lot. The principle behind these charges is the same as me offering to go and gamble with your money at the casino. If I win, I take 20pc of the gains, but if my luck's out, sorry chum, it's your loss. Some are better at it than others, but across the industry as a whole, performance is no better than the average punter. Regrettably, the culture of "I'll take the upside and you'll take the downside" is one of finance's defining features.
The Labour leader cites train station car parks, airline levies, unauthorised overdraft charges and consumer helpline tariffs as representative of "rip-off Britain". All of them are examples of captive customer bases, where prices are either untransparent or your only option is to cough up or go without. Finance is not so dissimilar.
The recent crackdown on airline booking fees suggests limited progress. Tougher rules on commission disclosure in financial services are also already pending. But Lord please save us from the call for more regulation which is the subtext of Mr Miliband's attack on "rip-off Britain".
The UK doesn't need a new "consumer watchdog", still less is it necessary to reinvent the Prices Commission, that doomed experiment in price regulation that came to epitomise 1970s policy failures. We've already got the Office of Fair Trading, while the last "consumer watchdog" to be set up by Labour, the Financial Services Authority, failed so spectacularly that it is being dismantled.
The FSA became so obsessed with consumer protection that it forgot its parallel responsibility for prudential oversight of the banking system, which collapsed comprehensively.
Far from making things better, the ever more voluminous rule book seems only to have made them a great deal worse. As one loophole is closed, the industry moves on to others. Worse, the ever rising cost of compliance is creating formidable barriers to entry, thereby entrenching existing oligopolies and preventing the natural, Darwinian process of replacing bad businesses with better ones.
There is something hypocritical about the politician who attacks the abuses of for-profit companies when we all know that the worst examples of "rip-off" service lie in the public sector. Who sticks up for the "squeezed middle" when they are surcharged through the tax system for "services" they neither need nor support?
The solution to rip-off Britain lies not with regulation but with business. Time and again, business innovation, not government, has proved the most effective answer to established monopoly. IBM (NYSE: IBM - news) was eventually destroyed by Microsoft (NasdaqGS: MSFT - news) , while likewise the Microsoft monopoly is now being undermined by Google (NasdaqGS: GOOG - news) , Apple (NasdaqGS: AAPL - news) and the internet.
There will always be those seeking a fast buck; it's the way of the world. The trick is to ensure that the landscape is sufficiently deregulated and transparent to ensure such operators are arbitraged away by better value for money providers.
The last thing we need is more highly paid busybodies trying to justify their existence with ever greater layers of regulation.
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