Thursday, December 11, 2008

National Bankruptcy Day, II

Mark at Publius Endures and Jon Schwenkler have taken notice of the potentially devastating impact of CPSIA on small businesses.

It's a serious issue that I blogged about last week. While big banks get bailouts, meanwhile Congress is regulating small businesses out of existence. I'm reminded of Ronald Reagan's description of liberal economics: "If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. If it stops moving, subsidize it."

2 comments:

  1. It's a serious issue that I blogged about last week. While big banks get bailouts, meanwhile Congress is regulating small businesses out of existence. I'm reminded of Ronald Reagan's description of liberal economics: "If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. If it stops moving, subsidize it."

    here I am with the counter point Robert, I know you don't mind hearing the other side of the story;

    all regulations do is force industry into paying their own bills, they do not arise from whole cloth they are written to address issues the industry created themselves but refuse to do anything about

    for instance, I remember decades ago flying over new York and California you would always see a bubble of sulfur, industry pouring their bronchitis in my kids air and cancer in my wifes water, industry refused to clean up the crap they were dumping in my kids air and they had to be forced into paying their own bills because they refused to otherwise.

    bing, Nixon (that flaming liberal) created the EPA

    of course there are regulations that are counter productive and those have to be revisited, regulations should NEVER be removed without examining what issue they were addressing and if the industry has addressed that issue on it's own.

    in any event, you site Reagan as some kind of example of regulations choking small business yet you know as a fact small business almost disappeared under Reagan and his policies, returned again under Clinton, disappeared again under bush.

    regulations do NOT impeded business they force them into paying their own bills and if they can't stay in business paying their own bills then I do not want to subsidize them with by giving my wife a mastectomy

    you and I agree on a bunch of things, ont of them being sometimes regulations are counter productive, the other being business must not get others to pay their expenses.

    I am also certain you realize regulations are necessary, for instance I am sure you know the very concept of money is a regulation, ownership and laws protecting property are regulations, laws against slamming into your kid with a sportscar is a regulation

    so there is the counter point, see you again soon

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  2. @liberal on the boaRD:

    Without getting into your generalized points, the problem is that this particular piece of legislation and the implementing rules impose very low costs on the big businesses (Mattel, et al) who violated the previous regulations. Meanwhile, it imposes extremely high costs on small businesses who were not the source of the problem, and who have never been alleged to cause problems. Many of these businesses are not even in the toy industry and had no reason to think that there was legislation like this coming down the Pike. The way the legislation and implementing rules are written, it is even going to result in MORE importation of childrens' products from China because it appears to require every "shipment" of products to get tested, at the cost of thousands each test. A "shipment" of mass-produced toys arriving on a huge container ship from China only needs to be tested when it is offloaded; meanwhile, a domestic manufacturer must test its products every time a batch goes to a distributor.

    In other words, Mattel can bring in many times more products from China without having to pay for as many tests as a domestic manufacturer. And that is before you factor in the difference in economies of scale between Mattel and a small business in the US.

    If this is "forcing industry into paying their own bills," then it's shifting those costs onto the innocent part of the industry and away from the malfeasant parts of the industry.

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