Money isn’t free, and it needs to be priced somehow. Pricing by risk makes a lot of sense, and you’re a bigger credit risk than a bank is.

In one of the strongest displays in recent memory of the bipartisan impulse to pretend economics doesn’t exist, Senators Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) and Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) want to cap credit card interest rates at 10 percent, and they’re making some exceptionally silly arguments to do so.

One of the talking points they have settled on, in a Fox News opinion piece and elsewhere, is that because banks can borrow at relatively low rates, it’s unfair to charge credit card customers higher rates. “Even though Big Banks can borrow money at less than 4.5% from the Federal Reserve, a recent Forbes report found that these same financial institutions are charging the average consumer 28.6% interest on credit cards,” they wrote for Fox News.

Who is more likely to pay back a loan, some person or a bank? Banks, famously, have a lot of money. As Nicholas Anthony and Norbert Michel of the Cato Institute point out in a blog post, a small bank can still have up to $600 million in assets. The biggest ones have over $1 trillion. This makes them very, very, very likely to pay back their loans.

Banks also take out loans all the time and pay them back all the time, way more frequently than individuals do. Banks frequently lend to each other for periods as short as a day. A bank lending to another bank for a day is just about the safest loan imaginable. The rate at which that happens is the federal funds rate, which is currently 4.5 percent, as Sanders and Hawley note.

Any loan to some person is going to be at a higher interest rate than that because some person is not a bank. If the interest rate on an essentially risk-free loan is 4.5 percent, the interest rate on any other loan is going to be higher than that.

You could demagogue this as some sort of unfair scheme by greedy financiers against the little guy, as Sanders and Hawley are doing. But it’s really just a commonsense intuition that banks, which have large sums of money and borrow all the time, are going to be a lot better at paying back loans than are individuals, who have comparatively little money and don’t borrow as often. Money isn’t free, and it needs to be priced somehow. Pricing by risk makes a lot of sense, and you’re a bigger credit risk than a bank is.