On Wednesday, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) finalized new rules on certain types of increasingly popular new payment methods. While primarily aimed at prepaid debit cards, the regulations are so broad that they also include new mobile payment options such as Google Wallet, PayPal, Venmo, and potentially many more. The rules effectively seek to regulate all these financial products in much the same manner that credit cards are currently regulated, with all the paperwork and compliance that entails. The new regulations threaten to crush these flexible payment methods simply because the bureaucrats cannot contemplate that a business activity might be better off beyond the reach of the regulators.