Chronicling the high cost of our legal system
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The remarkable recent advances in make-it-yourself technology are opening up all sorts of new possibilities for users, but also have the potential to freak out the CPSC, FDA, trade agencies and intellectual property lawyers, as well as gun-control advocates. When products extruded from local printers are inevitably involved in injuries, which distant parties can be sued? [Bloomberg]
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“I had to [explain she] could not find a second-hand crib because the CPSC basically outlawed” them [CPSC commissioner Nancy Nord, earlier here, here]
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Lenore Skenazy of Free-Range Kids is the guest essayist at Cato Unbound. Excerpt:
..any time a politician, principal, or bureaucrat wants to score points, he or she lets us know that kids are even more precious—and endangered—than we thought….
How far has society gone in dreaming up new dangers to protect our children from? Until you take a step back and look at all the new laws and regulations, you probably have no idea….
Over the summer, according to the Manchester, Connnecticut Patch, a local mom was charged with “risk of injury to a minor and failure to appear after police say she allowed her seven-year and 11-year old children to walk down to Spruce Street to buy pizza unsupervised.” This was a walk of half a mile….
…in the “real world,” stranger abductions are so rare that if for some reason you actually WANTED your child to be kidnapped by a stranger, do you know how long you’d have to keep your child outside, unattended, so that statistically the abduction would be likely to happen?
The answer is about 750,000 years, according to author Warwick Cairns. And after the first 100,000 years or so, your kid isn’t even cute anymore. …
At the same time, there is a parallel process going on the regulatory world, with bureaucrats looking ever more intently for ever less likely dangers, on the grounds that kids can never be safe enough. This explains things like the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s recall of a line of children’s jackets last year because the elastic waistbands had toggles on it “that could become snagged or caught in small spaces or doorways, which poses an entrapment hazard to children.”
Yes, it’s true: Those toggles could snag. Does that make them inherently more dangerous than, say, pigtails that could get caught in a door, or a charm bracelet that could get snagged on an electric window? I’m just free-associating products and problems here, because that’s what it feels like the CPSC does, too.
In the discussion, Skenazy is joined by Anthony Green, James A. Swartz and Joel Best.
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Medblogger Shadowfax (All Bleeding Stops) considers a study on the hazards of children’s bouncers. (via White Coat)
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Urgent alert from the Consumer Product Safety Commission: fail to clean a kid’s bouncy seat and it can get, ew, gross [Free-Range Kids]
And finally, the catchy, unsettling safety promotion video that’s been everywhere the last week or two, from the Melbourne transit authority:
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“Oh Buckyballs, my Buckyballs. The addictive magnetic desk toy succumbs to government pressure and resigns itself to life as a cherished relic of the past.” [Amanda Kooser, CNet] Earlier on the manufacturer’s war with the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) here, here, etc.
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“[An] unnamed company … had filed a suit, under seal, to challenge aspects of the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s new public database. The federal district court found for the company earlier this week, ruling that the agency’s attempt to publish an incident report on the database about the company’s product was arbitrary and capricious, and an abuse of discretion. See Company Doe v. Tenenbaum, No. 8:11-cv-02958 (D. Md.10/9/12).” [Sean Wajert] I covered the CPSC’s problematic safety-complaints database last year in a Cato post and in Overlawyered posts here, here, etc.
A small company goes right on defying the Consumer Product Safety Commission: I’ve got more at Cato at Liberty (& see Nick Farr, Abnormal Use).
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The maker of the popular rare earth magnetic adult toy is defiant, and Reason.tv has a video [earlier here, here, and here]. “We’re the first company in 11 years that has said no to the Consumer Product Safety Commission.”
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Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) says the little wrapped pods of laundry detergent that have become popular recently are too easily mistaken for candies or other treats, and that when he saw one on a staffer’s desk he wanted to eat it himself. “The only way to make them more attractive to Chuck Schumer would be to shape them like little TV cameras.” [Jim Treacher, Daily Caller]
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Buckyballs are highly popular supermagnetic desktop toys for adults and labeled against use by kids. Nonetheless, some kids obtain the tiny balls and swallow them, with harmful or even lethal results. The Consumer Product Safety Commission has responded with an unusually aggressive show of legal muscle to force the product off the market: while suing the manufacturer, it strong-armed retailers into suspending Buckyball sales, thus cutting off the manufacturer’s revenue while a court decides whether the commission had an adequate basis in law and fact for its action. [Nick Farr, Abnormal Use; manufacturer statement; Time; ABA Journal; Michelle Malkin; Point of Law]
More: “CPSC wants to put a child-proof cap on your life.” [@radleybalko]
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Individual liberty, free markets, and peace: the world's premier libertarian think tank. Publishes Cato at Liberty, where I blog on contemporary policy issues.
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