I don't see why it's moral to hide the cost of credit card purchases in the price, and immoral to charge explicitely for it. I don't like the fact that I subsidize credit card users when I pay cash. There is no difference in the end between a credit card surcharge and a cash discount. But it gives the state more excuses to hire more regulators earning huge salaries.
This deviousness may be a federal law now, but the last I knew it was a state law here in NY.
I disagree about mom and pop businesses not reporting the sales, but it sounds like a good idea if you can get away with it. My brother had a business here for many years. He used to charge for credit card purchases. Then the state thugs passed the law so he switched to a cash discount. I believe he still does it. He does report all his income though. In fact the state criminals extort more "taxes" from him than he owes, but that's another story.
One of the reasons there aren't many small businesses left is the state regulators don't want to bother regulating them, so they simply put small businesses out of business.
Some of you think all these regulations are a good idea. You couldn't be more wrong. There are so many regulations that no one could possibly know more than a small fraction of them. Your elected representatives, who are supposed to be in charge, are ignorant of most of them. It couldn't be otherwise. There are just too many, and their numbers grow every day. All these regulations drive up the cost of doing business enormously. We all pay these costs. I wish more people knew about them, but I guess they never will, and probably they don't care.
Most businesses don't defraud their customers. Those that do, go out of business. Fraud, unless you work for the government, has always been illegal. Do you know how much you pay in taxes and what you get for it? I can tell you this, any business that operated like governments do would go out of business in a hurry, and they should.
Freedom works best, and there is no more important freedom than freedom of the marketplace. We had freedom in this country for 200 years and in that time our economy grew from nothing to the biggest in the world. We out-invented and out-produced just about everyone. Now we are hanging on by our fingernails. The beauty of the free market is it works well even if we don't understand it. As one of my favorite economics perfessors put it, "The free marketplace isn't perfect but it's a lot closer to perfection than anything else we will encounter on this earth".
I encountered yet another criminal activity by the thugs in Albany a few months ago. I went to a good auto mechanic who happens to be a long time friend. He told me the price of tires just went up. He used to charge $70 a tire plus a $1.50 disposal fee. Not any more. He got a letter from Albany telling him he had to bury the disposal fee in the price. So now the tires cost $71.50. In addition he has to add a "STATE MANDATED DISPOSAL FEE" of $2.50. As he pointed out, the state disposes of nothing. It's simply another excise tax. Can you spell fraud, boys and girls? It's a beautiful operation. When you buy tires and see the price has gone up you blame the greedy retailers or manufacturers. You never blame the criminals you elect to the government. And I suppose the environmentalists have an orgasm over this one.
And this is the tip of the tip of the tip of the iceberg.