Take the laissez–faire attitude in government, with a sprinkling of corruption at the highest levels of the financial industry, and you get merchant costs that you have in the US.

Wow, what a claim, right?

Let me ask you this. In what industry in the history of the world's economies can prices (such as those that banks / credit cards charge merchants) remain so stable in a truly competitive environment?

Let me help you. The answer is NONE.

I was not diving into VISA's market power, their ability to price their services, nor other politics.

Perhaps not on micro-scale, but on macro-scale it's certainly arguable that over priced goods extract value from an economy unnecessarily. In a way perhaps this sort of tactic can have negative overall effect on economy, and thus create negative value.

Otherwise it would seem the word "value" has no real meaning.

If this were a drawing, total value would be a summation of cost to provide the aervice (C), price to the customer (P) and benefit to the customer (B). Value captured by VISA is P-C and value captured by customer is B-P.

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A farmer asks an engineer, a physicist and a mathematician to build the most efficient fence around his flock of sheep.

The engineer builds a square fence around the sheep and says "That's the best I can do".

The physicist builds a circular fence, then says "That's the best I can do".

The mathematician smirks and takes a meter-long length of fence, wraps it around himself and declares triumphantly "I define myself to be outside!"