Do you pay off your credit cards in full every month? Something like one-third of all credit-card users do. If you pay in full within the grace period every month, the bank can’t charge you any interest. And many cards no longer have an automatic annual fee. So people who manage their use of credit prudently don’t generate a lot of income for the banks that issue their credit cards.

The credit card industry has an utterly charming term for people like me (and perhaps you) who pay off their balances every month: “deadbeats.” Now, as a result of new rules being considered by Congress and cheer-led by the President in his most recent taxpayer-funded campaign speeches, credit card issuers will be taking aim at deadbeats.

The basic thrust of the new rulemaking is to curtail the ways in which banks can take additional revenue from their best customers, the people who pull large balances month after month and make regular high-rate interest payments. If you read the fine print of your credit-card agreement, you’ll see that it’s a legal contract between you and the bank, which gives them the right to change the material terms and conditions as they see fit. (Provided they send you notice that they’re doing so. That’s the purpose of those little fliers covered with obscure legalese in microscopic print which you always throw away without reading.)

In a recession, the credit quality of unsecured consumer borrowing plummets. Default rates tick up, and banks start losing money. Every time there’s a recession, they pull stunts like increasing your interest rate for new purchases, applying your payments to the highest-rate portion of your balance, tacking on hidden fees, reducing your credit lines, and mining your mortgage-payment and phone bill data for clues that you’re getting overextended.

And every recession, Congress puts on rules restricting these practices, as they are about to this week. (When the economy recovers, banking lobbyists always get the restrictions quietly removed again.)

This time, things are different. For one thing, this whole recession is about credit impairment. Not only are banks responding to cyclical increases in credit-card defaults. They’re also looking to reduce the total amount of credit that gets extended to consumers. That reduction will remain operative even after the recession ends.

For another thing, this Congress and Administration are entirely willing to interfere in the banking industry. Having goosed hundreds of banks with TARP money, the government is acting like they own them. Forget about the fact that preferred stock ownership isn’t supposed to confer any right to interfere with management. After all, the government can make the rules any way they see fit, including changing them in arbitrary ways on the fly.

The government doesn’t have nefarious designs. They want to do the right thing, which broadly means they want the economy to get better and ordinary people’s material circumstances to improve. The problem is that government imposes one-size-fits-all solutions on a very complicated economy with no awareness whatsoever that there are unintended consequences to everything they do. Activist government simply takes for granted that it’s justified in using its nearly-uncontrollable power.

In this case, government is telling its captive banking industry to stop treating its most lucrative customers the way a pusher deals with an addict. The unsecured consumer credit industry is a remarkable one in that the bulk of its profitability comes from behavior (like carrying high-rate credit card balances) that most of us would recognize as terribly ill-advised.

There’s another aspect to this as well, which is that the government is deeply frightened at the sudden decline in consumer borrowing, which stands to impose a permanent undertow on economic growth. The whole case underlying fiscal stimulus is based on the theory that government can tide the economy over with artificial demand until consumers start spending again. If consumers don’t come back (which is entirely reasonable, given the reduction in housing and stock market values), then the government is stuck holding on to the kind of borrowings that would make credit-card issuers lick their chops in eager anticipation.

For those reasons, the government wants to keep the credit card industry from penalizing overextended consumers, but at the same time not to curtail the availability of credit.

Those are obviously incompatible goals. If you prevent pushers from abusively taking extra fees from overextended addicts, then the pushers will have to raise the basic price of smack, so as to cover their losses. And if you tell them simultaneously that the price of smack will only be allowed to rise so fast, then they’ll simply have to do less business. But if on top of that you then tell them you don’t want them doing less business, they’re stuck.

That brings us back to the deadbeats. The credit card industry will have no choice but to start raising fees on the people who do what your mother always told you to do: pay off your debts on time and avoid high-rate balances. Stories are circulating that typical credit cards will start carrying mandatory fees, higher interest rates, and reduced or eliminated grace periods. As long as you’re going to spend money with plastic, your bank is going to insist on taking a cut, and they’ll find a way to do so.

What’s scary about this, is that this will be officially government-sanctioned behavior. It’s precisely the same as Barack Obama telling Chrysler’s secured debtholders to go pound sand up their backsides. With the auto industry, taxpayers are subsidizing the vastly overpriced labor contracts of people who work for a company that by rights should go out of business. With credit cards, people who do the right thing and manage their credit prudently will be forced to subsidize those who don’t.

And because the government has injected itself as the party which can and does ineluctably impose these uneconomic arrangements, there’s not a damned thing you can do about it.

So what are you carrying in your wallet? I’m a bona fide deadbeat. I hate being in debt so much that I don’t even have a mortgage. I’ll definitely be carrying less plastic from now on.

And I’m probably not alone. This story will have legs.