Toy Story II

Thank you for your reasoned arguments regarding CPSIA. I truly hope that this is a sign that the days are coming to an end when the knee-jerk response to opponents of consumer product regulation is “you all just want people to DIE for your filthy lucre!!!!” While I think all can agree that at least some quantity of legislation is necessary, I would hope all can also agree that more regulation is not necessarily better, and can indeed have side effects so harmful that the cure is worse than the disease.

The book thing particularly troubles me. To date there are no known cases of a child getting lead poisoning from a book, and yet many vintage books do contain lead. Rather than seeing this as evidence that perhaps lead content is not directly determinative of lead poisoning outcomes, however, we are searching in vain for scientific evidence that vintage books do not contain lead. While it’s easy enough to see the ridiculousness of this approach when it comes to books, however, I find few enough people willing to apply it to other children’s products. There is no known case of a child being poisoned by eating their clothing either (indeed, they are far more danger from being strangled by their hoodie drawstrings) but for some reason, I see a lot of arguments that if CPSIA forces a clothing item off the shelves, it must be because it was unsafe to begin with.

So I hope that this means the beginning of the end of such circular reasoning. CPSIA was supposed to increase consumer confidence in product safety, but I find it’s doing exactly the opposite, fostering an environment of suspicion. We are already seeing reputable producers of harmless products go out of business while disreputable producers just fake their certifications, and a black market in unregulated goods will inevitably start to emerge. Surely this can’t be a good thing for consumer safety.

I know I don’t want to live in a world where children’s jeans and books are hawked illegally out of the backs of trucks. I certainly hope the rest of the country agrees with me on that point!

“if these are the consequences – small businesses wiped out, only the big manufacturers able to bear the heavy burdens of compliance, and a lot of nonsense like old childrens books made unsalable – do we think it’s a good law? Is the safety benefit worth these costs?”

John, you know that I like a lot of what you write, but this is piffle. It’s the wrong question, and the wrong question obtained through the same reasoning that caused people like you to support the Iraq War.

Of course it’s not a good law. *No good law is obtainable.* We’re talking about a law passed by the Bush-era Congress (as if the current Congress is really doing much better). The GOP has done damage to this country that isn’t going to be fixed quickly, if at all, and any attempt at making regulations that don’t overreach or underreach was part of what was damaged. You can’t even try to fix this thing without the handmade toys people going off about elitist PIRG people like the worst, most vicious Limbaugh dittohead.

So, to get back to the Iraq War example. Was a war that was sure to be done badly, with a probable million of Iraqis killed, worth it? Given that no “good war” option was available? No, it was not, and that should have been apparent from the start. Now back to toys. Is this bad law worth it, given that our system is now dysfunctional enough so that no good one is available? Yes, it appears to me that it is. There was no other way to get the large manufacturers to comply, and unlike a war, “a 1967 edition of “The Outsiders”” does not make a convincing casualty. And the people who say that no children were dying from toys made by large manufacturers are simply wrong.

So these people should get involved in the political system for the next go-round. I read many of them asking how they could have known this would happen. That’s the kind of informed and active citizenship that got us the Bush years in the first place.

Rich, the “Bush era Congress” was a Congress controlled by Democrats for two years before the election, which covers the time this law was written. The CPSIA had 106 sponsors, and 101 of them were Democrats, so I am not really sure what Bush has to do with it, other than he was the sitting President when the Democrat led Congress presented him a feel-good bill with a veto proof majority.

Yes, Popehat was mistaken when he said that nobody died from lead toys. One child died from swallowing an imported lead charm which already violated the legal standards for lead in China- and he might have survived had his mother realized he’d swallowed the charm, and had the hospital recognized it as a foreign object in his x-rays- instead, it was in his system for some time while he grew sicker and sicker, and it’s a horrible tragedy. So regulate children’s jewelry and imports.
And heartbreaking as it is, that is the only lead related death.
If Rich knows of other harm related to lead in children’s products, by all means, post the data and the sources. I have looked at the CPSC figures, and so has Sarah, and that’s all we can find, nor is there much evidence that children were harmed by lead in toys or other products- most of the time the lead was discovered by testing the toy, not due to any harm to children.

Many children have died from drawstrings in their sweatshirts, so regulate those. Oh, wait- they have already been illegal since the 70s.
Many children have died from crib and bassinet accidents, or choking on small parts, so regulate those (oops, again- that was already being done).
Children have died from accidents on their motorized vehicles, but not from the lead in them.

Nobody died or even got sick from the lead (some real, but mostly imagined) in books, socks, shirts, zippers, microscope bulbs, underwear, scarves, mittens, coats, desks, bikes, DVDs, CDs, playing cards, board games, computer games, baseball cards, felt toys, yarn plushies, math manipulatives, blue jeans, etc, etc, etc.

One 1967 book is hardly the only casualty here- we are talking THOUSANDS of pre-1985 books that have never been reprinted, in many cases the bookplates were lost or destroyed after that publishing run, books that have NO record of ever causing a child harm.
We are talking hundreds, of not more, of small, safe, cottage industries that use products that are either inherently lead-free or, in the case of snaps and zippers, have absolutely no history of poisoning a child, yet can no longer support their families because they can’t afford the devastating costs of multiple, redundant tests, and in August these must be third party tests which destroy the product, ending one of a kind artisan toy making.
We are talking about a German toy company called Selecta that made safe, beautiful, environmentally friendly, non-toxic toys that simply cannot afford the redundant testing required by this asinine law, because they would have to price their products out of the market- so they have withdrawn from the American market.

The testing must be at approved labs. There are none west of Texas, and precious few east of Texas. There are quite a few in China, which is where the leaded toys came from in the first place.

As for being ‘informed and active,’ well, not even the ALA realized until around December that the big “TOY” bill that PIRG and Public Citizen touted included books. How many laws does Congress pass in a year? How many regulations are added to that?

In fact, the ALA reports that when they complained to Congress, Congressional reps expressed surprise that their own bill actually covered books.

It’s not clear to me how it supposedly keeps any children safe when it leaves in the market those companies responsible for the lead recalls in the first place, and prices out of the market unoffending products such as knitted baby booties and books published before 1985.

DeputyHeadmistress, come on. “Nobody died or even got sick from the lead” in those things? How do you know? Because the CPSC reports every toy-related death or illness? And if I see one more mention of the developmentally delayed kid and the mother who somehow should have known better, I’m really going to go off on you. I have a kid with Tourette’s, and he routinely chews on things, when that’s the kind of tic he has. Developmentally delayed children are not some weird exception that don’t really have to be taken into account because normal people don’t do that.

Now, what I meant by the “Bush era Congress” is really pretty simple. The ideal way to make these kinds of regulations is slowly. Bit by bit you add important cases, and that way you don’t overshoot and suddenly find yourself driving lots of small businesspeople out of business. But the GOP has systematically made that approach impossible. The choice is either a regulatory apparatus that does nearly nothing, because regulation has been discredited and institutionally demolished, or a feel-good bill that suddenly slaps in a poorly conceived regulation all at once.

And yes, your people should have been all over this long ago. You were content not to be involved until it directly affected you. All right, bad decision; there’s no way that scandals at large toy companies aren’t going to affect small producers too. Now that you are involved, good — but perhaps you can avoid going instantly to arguing like a right-winger.

Sarah, that comment of yours is either purposefully deceptive or just incorrect. Check out, let’s say, this CDC publication for an explanation of how the 10ug/dl level was set. It’s not that levels below this don’t cause damage. Nor is damage “discernible” at low levels; the most probable effect is the loss of a few points of IQ, and how are you possibly going to detect that?

As I wrote above, you’re arguing like right-wingers. You don’t think that exposures from lead in toys are worth bothering about — OK. Why should I think that the minimal job losses from people hand-making expensive toys for rich people are worth bothering about? I could go into similar statistics about how many jobs are in the large manufacturers rather than the little boutique places. You don’t care about the tail end of exposure — why should I care about the tail end of job loss?

Now, in fact, I do agree that this law should be changed so that small producers aren’t driven out of business by testing that their products don’t need and can’t support. The clear way to go was to have the suppliers of zippers, fasteners, and so on test these mass-produced products, and then have small producers just say that they are using tested materials. But I have no sympathy for someone arguing that hey, there’s lots of bigger sources of lead, so who cares if there’s lead paint on toys.

On the contrary, Rich, I do indeed believe that lead poisoning is an issue we need to deal with. I’m merely pointing out that the place we should start, if we want to be effective, is NOT lead in children’s products.

Surely it is evident that the money and effort government has are both finite, and therefore are best spent on that which is effective. If, like me, you support reducing lead exposure in children, is it really “arguing like a right-winger” (whatever that means) to say that we should attack the problem first from the most effective angle?

I have actually read that CDC publication, 137 pages though it is, and what I got from reading it is that the CDC did consider lowering the blood lead level of concern, but decided not to precisely because they could not with any reliability detect damage at BLLs below 10 ug/dl. You seem to be arguing that the level of concern should be lower. If by your own admission damage is not discernible at lower BLLs, by what logic do you imagine anyone can prove damage is not there?

And I agree that loss of small business is an issue we need to deal with, I’m merely pointing out that the place to start, if we want to be effective, is NOT with tiny producers of boutique children’s toys.

And let’s get real. When you write “we should attack the problem first from the most effective angle”, what do you mean? That you are going to spend any effort whatsoever on this the moment that it drops off the toy radar screen? No. There’s no way for people to cash in regulation on toys in exchange for regulation on lead paint in houses. That’s exactly what I’ve been writing, if you’ve been paying attention. In a dysfunctional system, you can’t say “we should spend X amount of dollars on lead; let’s start with houses.” Y0u can only take advantage of scandal to do some small part of the problem that should have been done more slowly and gracefully a long time ago.

I’ve seen all these arguments of yours time and time again. Like, we should not spend any money against global warming, because we could save lives more cheaply by buying seat belts. If you want to do that, go campaign to buy seat belts. If the only time I hear it is when you don’t want people to do something, it’s a dodge.

Are you sure that you’re not an ex-tobacco-industry person, or trained by them, or something?

Rich, please do not put words in my mouth.
“And if I see one more mention of the developmentally delayed kid and the mother who somehow should have known better, I’m really going to go off on you. I have a kid with Tourette’s, and he routinely chews on things, when that’s the kind of tic he has.”
“Go OFF on me?” Contrary to your utterly groundless assumptions about me, I am also the mother of a profoundly disabled child- she is 21 and does not speak, doesn’t toilet herself, dresses herself with help and functions at approximately the level of a two year old. We adopted her when she was six years old, and I perfectly well understand how easy it is for a child like her to be harmed by the belongings of others without a mother being neglectful, so I certainly don’t need you to preach at me or threaten me.
I did not blame the mother, I have never blamed the mother, I have only felt great anguish for her. I merely pointed out that it was a combination of factors that resulted in the tragic death, not just that he swallowed the toy, and one of those factors was that she did not know he’d swallowed the toy, another was that the hospital did not recognize it as a foreign object. To my mind, these things only add to the tragedy of the situation.

You were content not to be involved until it directly affected you.
Bollocks. I got involved the same day I heard of it and at the time I did not even realize that it did. I am not a crafter, not a small business owner, and the effect I will experience is in a very small way, as I sell a few used books to other book junkies like myself at 3-10 dollars a book, mainly to pay for my habit of buying used books.

So what’s your basis for these false accusations? The fact that I disagree with you seems to be it.
And what on earth is ‘arguing like a right-winger?’ based on the style of your attacks, it seems to be using facts instead of emotional attacks.

You don’t think that exposures from lead in toys are worth bothering about—OK.
Um, no, that’s not what I said. That’s not what Sarah said. I don’t think IMAGINARY lead in toys is worth bothering about.
I don’t think lead in sources that have never been shown to result in any rise in blood level lead is worth bothering about- board books that babies chew, sure, test them. Testing millions of books to discover lead in the cover illustration of a 1950 edition of Little Women? That’s not saving any children, and it’s a misuse of resources that would be better directed toward known sources of significant levels of lead poisoning- the drinking supply and water in old houses.
Lead in painted toys is a known and commonsense threat- it’s been banned for years, keep it banned.
Lead in children’s jewelry, definitely a threat, a high risk item, test it and ban it.
Rhinestones appear to have high levels of lead, and it makes sense that these would also be a choking hazard, so ban them for children, say, 6 and under.

Furthermore, after August the testing has to be third party wet testing, which destroys the item being tested. It’s also very expensive. This is economically feasible for a company selling a million Barbie dolls each year or other McSame toys, but it not only makes no sense, it’s impossible and pointless for small runs, one of a kind items, and out of print books.

I find it very instructive that you have yet to offer any actual facts- just emotional arguments based on your false personal assumptions. Where is your evidence that a child has been harmed by reading a pre-1985 book? Where is your evidence that a child was harmed by an untested pair of blue jeans or the snaps in his over-the-diaper shirt?

It’s a badly written law that needs to be fixed, and only Congress can fix it.

I’m absolutely certain I’m not in any way associated with the tobacco industry. I don’t even smoke. I’m not in any way associated with any industry of any kind. I just make crocheted baby booties out of my home, since my health won’t permit me to teach mathematics anymore. The largest “industry” I’ve ever worked for was a large state university, if you can count that as an industry.

I’m glad to hear that we can both agree that CPSIA is a turkey of a law. However, I disagree that the only way to attack a problem is by using opportunities created by scandals. Call me old-fashioned, but I think it is incumbent on those who would be statesmen and stateswomen to consider the problems that face our country carefully and with deliberation, not in haste or in reaction to scandal; to craft laws that are both proscriptive of negative behaviors and protective of the rights of the innocent; and to inform themselves on the issues so that they are prepared to lead. Even if all our legislators did this, they would still disagree; but their debates would be a hell of a lot more substantive.

In fact, this debate you and I are having, Rich, is more substantive than anything Congress came up with over CPSIA. I watched the speeches on YouTube; it was clear that those who had written the law had not considered many important issues (like whether it would be possible to pass the buck largely to CPSC to fill in the details in only 6 months) and that most who had voted for it thought it was limited to toys.

I agree that it’s overly simplistic to say “We have X dollars; spend it here.” However, it is equally simplistic to strike blindly at a problem without considering the effectiveness of the approach. Money and time is wasted that way, money and time that then distract from more effective efforts. The opportunity cost of just randomly acting against a problem is too high.

This issue is completely independent of opinions other issues like global warming. There is a bewildering variety of thought among people who oppose CPSIA. They say politics makes strange bedfellows, and in this case we have everybody from gun control advocates to conspiracy-minded libertarians to Iraq war opponents to pro-lifers siding together against CPSIA. It is truly that rare bird, a bipartisan issue.

Oh, and in case you were interested, I don’t just talk. (I’m talking today because I’m not feeling well.) Just to give one issue, I started a science club for neighborhood kids because I wasn’t satisfied with the school’s science program. (It’s currently on hiatus for the winter, because we meet outdoors.) I firmly believe that if you feel strongly about an issue, as I do about science education, you should do something about it besides whine about what other people aren’t doing. That’s why I speak out against CPSIA, even as I retool my business to comply with it.

“However, I disagree that the only way to attack a problem is by using opportunities created by scandals. ”

If only. Sarah, look at what’s happened around this particular law. I may be wrong, but I really don’t remember the small toy producers / handmade toy makers / crafters organizing like this until this law passed. Am I incorrect? In effect, the law was the scandal that your community organized around. Now, you aren’t legislators — but you’re certainly trying to use the scandal to get people together to affect legislation, just as people did with the lead-paint-on-Chinese-toys thing even though they’d been working on this for years.

And the system is especially broken right now. In effect, you have half the country behind a party that is in line with all the anti-regulatory tropes. That means that you can’t, metaphorically, have half a regulation. It’s always either nothing, or suddenly you get something and it’s been deliberated over for maybe two hours. And then you need to go back and fix it.

DeputyHeadmistress, when you people do things like bring up details of a case like that, yeah, it means something. How does it “being a combination of factors that caused the tragic death” affect anything to do with this regulation?

YOU PEOPLE? What collective noun are you using to tidily label and dismiss my points? Mothers of handicapped children? Women? bloggers? “People who disagree with me?” How is this even useful?

The point is- that this regulation wouldn’t even have saved that child. He died because he swallowed an item that already violated the law in the country where it was made, that already violated the standards set by the company that bought the charm, and he died because of a tragic collection of factors the regulation cannot address, therefore, it is exploitative and emotional propaganda rather than corrective or informative to use his tragic death as the justification for this draconian law.

What, in this regulation, is going to prevent Chinese companies from getting their products tested at Chinese testing labs (they are CPSC approved) and receiving forged certificates and importing them here as usual?

And yes, you were content not to be involved until it affected you. (Of course I mean this in a group sense—I have no idea what your personal history is.) When people were campaigning for years about lead and phthlates, did any handmade toy people involved say, “Hey, if we actually get this going, don’t regulate us”?Maybe they did, but I certainly don’t recall it. Because, as best as I can remember, your community didn’t care until their ox was gored.

I have no idea why you prefer to address my points by tidily assigning me to a particular group and then dismissing my points because of some moral failing, perceived or imagined, in that group- especially when I am not a member of the group to which you keep assigning me.
Tell the truth- you did not even read the full paragraph, did you? Because it did not affect me, and my ox was not and is not gored. I am not a crafter. I am not a handmade toy person. I do not craft. I do not sell crafts. Sometimes I sell a few used books but my family will eat regardless of whether or not I continue to do this. I am not a member of whatever ‘community’ you are assigning me to. I sometimes BUY handcrafted items, and for years I found it best to clothe my disabled child by paying a crafter to make her clothes to fit her and to use fastenings she can manage- that is now a felony, but thankfully for me one of my other daughters can sew her clothes. But I could not possibly tell you what the handmade toy community was doing as a group because I was not part of that ‘community.’

I heard of the law and recognized it as the over reaching, irrational boon-doggle it is, and I read the law and wrote about it the same day I heard of it- before I realized that it would make my book-selling illegal. I have done this before on other issues- in, no doubt, a fashion not organzied enough to meet your moral standards, but then, you are not my judge.
And In what sense do you imagine this gored my ox?

And you still don’t care about anything except your ox. You don’t “think IMAGINARY lead in toys is worth bothering about”? It’s not imaginary.

How odd that you have failed to provide a single fact to back up your assertion, then. The imaginary lead I am talking about is lead in books, socks, shirts, lead-free paint, yarn, fabric, and the vast majority of lead-free products regulated by this law- the testing required is testing for a substance that doesn’t exist in those products, it is entirely pretend. That’s my point- I am not in favor of bothering about lead in things that have never been shown to cause elevated blood levels of lead.

You say that it’s fine for children’s jewelry and rhinestones to be tested, but guess what? You, as a group, didn’t do squat to make that happen in a selective way.

What group? I haven’t been part of any crafting or small business community. And from what I understand from most of the crafters I’ve been talking to, many of them got involved in what they were doing in the first place because they wanted to provide a safe alternative to imported junk. Are you seriously arguing that you decide what level of involvement is serious enough to merit respectability or some sort of moral authority? Are YOU part of the crafting community that you are able to speak with any authority about what they have or have not done as a group?

I had no idea (nor did most people) that rhinestones had elevated levels of lead, or that jewelry often did, so, no, of course I didn’t make any effort to make that happen (and neither did anybody else, not in a meaningful way, “Test everything because we’re scared and we don’t care how likely it is that this would make a child sick” is not a meaningful or reasonable reaction).

“So the people who cared about it did the only thing they could, which was to make it happen in a non-selective way.
That is not the only thing they could have done (and how do you know what they were thinking?)- if they actually knew rhinestones had elevated levels of lead, they could have publicized that fact, but they did not because they didn’t know.
They could have required testing at the supplier level rather than redundant component testing by each and ever user of the same supplies. They could have not required expensive third party testing that destroys the final product. They could have made the rules apply to children 6 and under instead of all products for 12 and under. They could have banned imports from China, the source of all the lead problems. they could have have imposed stricter standards on imports, the source of all the problems. They could have provided the funding to enforce the laws already on the books (as it is, the CPSC still doesn’t have any additional funding until later this year). All the ways they could have taken care of the problem with far less unintended disaster are pretty much laid out in the reform bills offered.

“And mostly I don’t believe you because it really makes no difference to you that I actually agree with you on the merits of fixing this particular law. You don’t just want me to agree that Congress should fix it—you want to go into this standard anti-regulatory bumf. That’s a key sign of people whose agenda is not what it seems.”

You don’t believe me about what?
WHAT are you talking about? You argue all over the place, conveniently ignore real facts and corrections to your false assumptions just to make more ad hominem attacks, and throw in everything but the kitchen sink, presumably preferring the most irrelevant points you can find.
What ‘anti-regulatory bumf?’ You sound like a conspiracy theorist to me.

One of the things I have noticed about this bill, as Sarah pointed out, is that those trying to get it fixed include people from both pretty much every political party, every point on the political spectrum- liberals, progressives, conservatives, libertarians, environmentalists, as Sarah said, all kinds of people who would never agree with each other on anything can see that this law is deeply flawed. The only agenda I’ve seen from those on ‘my’ side is to fix this bill. On other issues, ‘we’ are all over the board.

Mark @ 12: I would like to see the supporting evidence for the claim that the big manufacturers lobbied for this. I’ve read the congressional testimony and it comes mainly from citizen’s groups (self appointed and otherwise). And I think several people have pointed out that the lobbying budgets look defensive, not offensive. True, the larger manufacturers get the benefit of economy of scale, but the simple fact is that Congress passed this more or less in a big rush, bit off more than they should have, and now they are denying that there are any problems, or if there are, Nord caused them. Meanwhile, the “citizen’s” groups are negotiating by taking three interesting positions: (1) that there are no problems, (2) the CPSC can fix the problems by making rules, and (3) every ruling the CPSC makes is contrary to the law (see (1)).

The politics have been interesting. A Democratic Congress passed it, a Republican President signed it. A Chief Counsel hired by Bush appointees found that the lead rules are retroactive, but the phthalate ban is not. When the citizen’s groups started calling her and her non-retroactive ruling a last trick from the Bush administration, a little research showed that she was actually a generous supporter of Friends of Hillary.

Bravo, John Holbo, for staying on this and seeing through the empty rhetoric. The case for this law is “safety vs. profit,” the most transparently empty bit of nasty rhetoric ever. Throw in a little “it’s for the children” and who would oppose it? But the devil is in the details. Fashion-Incubator and others at first applauded the Act, but as we began to poke at the details, we started to realize that there were problems, not so much with the *what* as with the *how*. Apparel manufacture has specific processes that cannot be arbitrarily changed or ignored. The Fashion-Incubator forum members cobbled together an answer to one of the RFCs to try to educate the CPSC on how this thing could be done without putting everyone out of business, but since then Congress has tied the hands of the CPSC, blamed them for the law’s shortcomings and accusing them of not opening enough holes in the law, and the citizen’s groups have waged a campaign of FUD against all opponents while threatening to sue CPSC over anything less than the hardest line of enforcement.

Eric:
In answer to your question, first look at the lobby disclosure reports, which will show a massive increase in lobbying expenditure for Mattel and Hasbro beginning in the latter half of 2007 and continuing until the law was signed. Then you can look at the November 6, 2007 hearing testimony on behalf of Hasbro and NAM, which is close to uniformly supportive of the bill. In addition (I’m not sure if it’s still up, but it was as of December), the websites of several groups representing larger manufacturers indicated almost wholehearted support for the law. They pretty much didn’t start working to oppose or limit this law until after the grassroots opposition from small to medium sized businesses had gained momentum.

All that said, I’m not alleging that big manufacturers were out to hurt small businesses, who really don’t compete much against big manufacturers. Instead, all the information I have on this is that the lobbying was mostly to make sure that the big manufacturers would be able to handle whatever Congress threw their way while also being supportive of the legislation for PR purposes. So yeah, in a sense it probably could be characterized as “defensive” lobbying; but my understanding is that it was defensive lobbying that was exceedingly aware of the PR benefits of being supportive of the law overall.

When small businesses and trade groups actually did become aware of the law’s potential effects, Congress pretty much told them to buzz off on the grounds that, if the big manufacturers were ok with the law, then the small businesses shouldn’t have a problem with it.

“And yet any attempt to say so is ‘piffle’? Why?”

Because, to return to my original analogy, just like the Iraq War, it was bound to be a screw up. People going into the Iraq War should have been able to see that it was bound to involve massive deaths (of Iraqis, at least) and should therefore not have done it. People going into consumer safety product legislation in this era know that it’s bound to be a screw up. How could it not be? All of the people who are saying that it was a feel-good thing passed with lawmakers not really knowing what’s in it are correct. But since it, unlike the Iraq War, isn’t killing people, and since the alternative of doing nothing is killing people, it seems worth it to launch something that is bound to be screwed up somehow and fix it later.

So the whole “Wow, this is a screw up” thing is a lot like the people discovering in year 2 of the Iraq War that hey, maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. There were two questions in your original: “Is this a good law? Is the safety benefit worth these costs?” Well, no and yes. If people have created a system such that good consumer product legislation is impossible to pass, because anything measured and considered is going to get shot down by knee-jerk anti-regulatory rhetoric, then by definition the only things that are going to pass are going to be not measured or considered, they’re going to be snap reactions to news stories. The questions that you’re asking just don’t reflect the reality of what’s going on.

But of course the hurt they are not doing is purveying materials with dangerous lead content.

“my attempt to inform people apparently ticked you off. Which I find strange.”

Well, it’s because you’re not really either informing or alerting. It’s too much information to be a mere alert to people that the CSPIA problem exists. And I don’t think that you really know enough about it to be able to inform people. For instance, you don’t think that they’re coming up with a bunch of BS about lead, when they really are.

One more attempt at analogy. Let’s say that two years later, someone writes “Wow, Iraq War a failure, I’m surprised.” People then point out that by doing so, they are buying into a narrative of possible success, possible failure — let’s say, that the war could have been won or lost due to competence or incompetence. That effectively disagrees with the narrative of someone saying that the war was necessarily going to be a failure from the start, even though at that point, two years later, both people are saying that the Iraq War was a failure.

Although those two people agree at that point that the war was a failure — just as I agree with you that this law should be re-written — they have very different reasons for doing so. In particular, the one of them who thinks it may have been incompetence is more likely to be just as surprised that the next war is a failure, and to have effectively not learned anything from the experience, if it is true that it was necessarily going to fail.

And, again, it’s not that you’re just telling people that the problem exists. You’re saying that the anti-regulatory rhetoric is in this one case justified.

So truth is to be ignored when bad people happen to be right. I find that…not easy to grasp, at a minimum.

Bruce, from my viewpoint, you’re the ones ignoring truth, frankly.

I’m saying that this law involves regulatory overreach, and should be changed. That’s true, right?

I’m also saying that approximately all the arguments about lead used against CSPIA are either misleading or untrue. You apparently don’t know enough about lead to know this, but that doesn’t make it any less true.

And finally, I don’t see any sign that you understand *why* the law necessarily involved regulatory overreach, or why John’s “let’s just let the stopped clock rhetoric go because this one time it’s right” approach is not a good option for the people who want to ever do anything with product safety ever again.

I think my comment on the ecstasy-vs-equestrians post applies here too: everything is either safe or dangerous, and everything dangerous must be banned FOR THE SAKE OF THE CHILDREN!

(/facepalm)

And I’ve tried to explain, for n times now, why a reasonable risk assessment and, accordingly, a reasonable policy prescription, was impossible.

I think this is the crux of it: you were trying to explain to people, who feel they are going to be hurt by an unreasonable legislative act, that no legislative act would have been reasonable. Your defense of this perspective has become increasingly wild, as we see in this from comment #40:

Give in to that nonsense and you lose the ability to do anything, ever.

That’s a dramatic sentence. But nobody’s requiring you to take some kind of Custer’s Last Stand here on a CT thread. A lot of people feel personally affected by this legislation, they’ve voiced their concerns here. You’re talking to people who despite substantial disability are trying to eke out a living for themselves, and who are frightened they’ll no longer have a chance to do that. In response you’ve been insensitive to people with genuine concerns, and you’ve been hurtful.

I imagine you feel you’re trying to fight some monumental tide of bullshit with the power of words as best you can, but it’s not working. Luckily, this isn’t a place where one needs to engage that fight. Take advantage of that. As you said:

I think it’s time for me to give up.

That sounds about right.

All right then, I give up.

Slocum,

Scary, isn’t it. Though, it’s a morass of a bill. It’s hitting other types of manufacturers that are being blindsided by the law. Yamaha, Kawasaki and many other small motorbike and ATV manufacturers have told their dealers they can no longer sell the smallest sized vehicles aimed at children under 12. They are no longer allowed to sell the replacement parts either. Too much lead in the “substrates” of some parts, like brakes.

Remember, too, that the current amounts for lead 600 ppm, is going to drop over the next few years.

Virginia Postrel on the issue:

“Unfortunately, once you are ideologically committed to the idea of regulation, you can’t say that a given regulation is bad–or, worse, that maybe doing nothing new would have been the best course.

Maybe, as I argued to a skeptical editor, the system worked in the case of lead in children’s toys. Recalls, lawsuits, and reputational damage solved the real problem, and the CPSIA is just an extraordinarily costly way of demonstrating after-the-fact concern. But you simply cannot say such things in polite company. ”

The funny thing is that this is exactly the type of thing that Rich seems to want to fight against, but is it worth even considering, for a second, that it might be correct? Initial legislation got rid of the low-hanging fruit that was causing serious damage: lead paint, lead pipes, lead in gasoline. And it was really effective at that. Legislative spending might be good in the remediation area (replacing old paint for example). Why aren’t we doing more of that by the way?

But that fact that broad legislation is good in some cases doesn’t necessarily make it good in all cases. And just be cause it fixes some things, doesn’t mean that other methods aren’t better for related problems.

I wonder if there isn’t some sort of heuristic like “The government is better at making broad initial changes and getting at the first 80% of a problem, but other things work better the further along we get to the last 20% and 10% and 5% and 1% of a problem.”

Banning lead paint and pipes and gasoline dealt with an enormous part of the problem and was effective. Rich is right that libertarian arguments against that type of legislation shouldn’t be paid much attention to. (Were they?) But on the flip side, the reason they shouldn’t have been paid much attention to is that the benefit side of the cost benefit ratio was very high. Here the benefit side of the equation is MUCH smaller, and the cost side is at least as large and potentially larger. Which is where the libertarians or conservatives have their best arguments.

It seems to me that the objections are sliding scale. As the benefit goes down and the costs go up, almost everyone agrees that at some point the government needs to give up. The main differences between libertarians/rightists/conservatives/liberals/leftists is about what counts as a cost, what counts as a benefit, and how much of a cost/benefit ratio is appropriate.

What seems really weird is to react to the fact that libertarians tolerate certain cost/benefit ratios that liberals wouldn’t tolerate by asserting that even when the cost/benefit ratio looks out of whack to a liberal that you still can’t fix it because it gives power to the libertarian argument.

The fact is that not fixing it is what gives power to the libertarian argument, because it lets them say “see, liberals are so into being controlling that they won’t give it up even when it is obvious to everyone in the world that the cost/benefit ratio is out of kilter”.

Craig’s List is also covered by the ban:

Incidentally, I just learned that CPSIA would not even have saved the life of the one child who died from ingesting the lead charm. According to Senator Klobuchar of Minnesota’s page, the charm wasn’t intended for children at all. It was given away with his mother’s shoes- shoes for an adult woman are not covered by CPSiA:

“Jarnell swallowed part of a charm bracelet that came with his mother’s new Reebok sneakers. Doctors said his lead levels were three times the danger level. His death caused Reebok to recall 300,000 bracelets and eventually pay federal regulators a $1 million settlement.”