My lovely wife Angela, who is always on the lookout for bloggable topics, calls to my attention some serious controversy concerning the pending implementation of the Consumer Products Safety Improvement Act of 2008, which was drawn up in the wake of the Great Lead Paint Scare of 2007. The bill, which passed both chambers of Congress earlier this year with almost no opposition from anyone not named Ron Paul, requires that all toys be submitted to third-party testing and certification, and that toy makers permanently label each toy with a date and batch number to ensure easy enforcement. Uncle Sam, then, will step in and do the job that all those parents who bought their kids cheap Chinese toys in the first place were unable or unwilling to do.
The catch? You guessed it:
All of these changes will be fairly easy for large, multinational toy manufacturers to comply with. Large manufacturers who make thousands of units of each toy have very little incremental cost to pay for testing and update their molds to include batch labels.
For small American, Canadian, and European toymakers, however, the costs of mandatory testing will likely drive them out of business.
- A toymaker, for example, who makes wooden cars in his garage in Maine to supplement his income cannot afford the $4,000 fee per toy that testing labs are charging to assure compliance with the CPSIA.
- A work at home mom in Minnesota who makes dolls to sell at craft fairs must choose either to violate the law or cease operations.
- A small toy retailer in Vermont who imports wooden toys from Europe, which has long had stringent toy safety standards, must now pay for testing on every toy they import.
- And even the handful of larger toy makers who still employ workers in the United States face increased costs to comply with the CPSIA, even though American-made toys had nothing to do with the toy safety problems of 2007.
The CPSIA simply forgot to exclude the class of toys that have earned and kept the public’s trust: Toys made in the US, Canada, and Europe. The result, unless the law is modified, is that handmade toys will no longer be legal in the US.
(There’s much more here.) That last sentence from the above quotation is obviously something of an overstatement, but at least one company whose toys my family has purchased has already announced its intention to exit the U.S. market at the end of this year, with many others concerned that they may have to follow the same path. In any case, even if such smaller producers do manage to remain in business there can be no real doubt that such regulations would raise the cost of their products lead naturally to securing an even greater market share for those toy manufacturers that operate at a larger scale and can spread the cost of testing out over the huge volumes of toys that they make.
Stories of this sort are, of course, irritatingly familiar to regular readers of this blog, and in fact a similar moral was at the heart of my very first piece of real journalism. The far-too-predictable irony here is that many of the same forces who applauded the passage of the CPSIA back in August are now the ones lamenting its entirely foreseeable consequences: Mothering magazine, for example, is running an article celebrating the law’s passage in its most recent issue even as an action alert currently linked on its front page urges readers to call their representatives concerning what they call the law’s potentially “catastrophic results” for independent toymakers. Well, yeah. The natural step from here is, next time, to pause for a moment and think about the likely consequences before petitioning the government for help.
In fact, maybe there should be a law about that …
UPDATE: Per Scott Payne’s suggestion in the comments, any readers up for some activism could try adding their names to this petition, or perhaps writing their legislators.
UPDATE 2: Robert Stacy McCain has more, and indeed had more last week.
UPDATE 3: Mark has an excellent post as well, and links to this very good summary of what’s wrong with the law.
(Image via Flickrer Anchan_uk.)
Filed under: government/law, libertarianism
Wow – thank your wife for showing this to you. This isn’t just going to hurt small toymakers. Reading the law, it is going to devastate any company that imports or manufactures any type of product aimed primarily at children – school supply companies, toy makers, designers of childrens’ clothes, and a whole host of others.
I wonder if concerned readers ought not to coordinate themselves and thief friends/families to write their federal politicians to point out the problems with the law and urge for appropriate remediation. This issue seems ripe for a little grassroots blogospheric activism (or organizing if you don’tlike the “a” word).
Scott: Activism is great! I just added a couple of links.
Mark: Thanks for the insight. I’d already seen that independent children’s clothing textile manufacturers are up in arms …
Scott – no doubt about it, activism is necessary here. That’s a huge number of small businesses that are going to be hurt by this, in a huge number of congressional districts. Few of these businesses are well-organized to lobby effectively. I also sense that, because of the lack of hype about this legislation, many affected businesses don’t have the foggiest idea what is coming down the ‘pike.
Good point, Mark, and good update, John. Go forth my libertarian protest squad, write emails! Heh. In all seriousness, though, I think this is precisely the kind of talk into action that the blogosphere is primed for. Who says Daily Kos should have the monopoly on organizing people at a netroots levels?
[...] out the fledgling bit of blogospheric activisim getting started over at John Schwenkler’s place. These are heady times, [...]
Your link to the bill has expired. Try this:
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h110-4040
SSFC: Fixed it – thanks!
[...] Upturned Earth and Publius Endures, linked above, both of which have much more on why this is a terrible [...]
Thanks for publicizing this but as John said, this also affects clothing. To that end we have a War Room for up to the minute updates and focused activism. http://tinyurl.com/5fhzbd
Btw, Daily Kos is solidly on the side of USPIRG et al.
[...] has more (here, here, and here) on the piece of “grassroots, blogospheric activism” I pointed to last [...]
[...] more on this example of unintended consequences of hasty lawmaking in response to a panic, see Upturned Earth, which suggests that congress or regulators might be persuaded to amend or sensibly interpret the [...]
You guys can all thank WA Toxics Coalition for this debacle. They were more interested in looking good than in actually coming up with a good bill. On top of it all, they lied and smeared so many “facts” that people swallowed hook, line and sinker. The federal law has been modeled on WA Toxic Coalition’s bill in WA State. What a bunch of crooks – don’t trust them.