In a labor day interview on public radio's To the Best of Our Knowledge, Douglas Rushkoff cited the CPSIA as a recent example of government enacting laws for the benefit of corporations. He points out that corporations are, after all, the invention of government. Even though we live in a world now where corporations are free to compete with each other at a certain level...there's no competition with corporations themselves. A great recent example is the toy paint manufacturing scandal where all these conglomerates outsource their toy manufacturing to china and a bunch of toys came back with this lead-tainted paint. So...government comes in and says "we're going to create great regulations to prevent lead paint from ever getting in children's mouths again." And what that is is a testing procedure, so it costs maybe 50-60 thousand dollars for a toy company to test a toy before they can put it out on the market. [Note: we at the HTA would characterize these costs as $200 to $3,000 per item] Well what does that do to the small toy manufacturers or the company that's making a hundred of something rather than a hundred thousand of something? They can't spend $50,000 per toy that they're manufacturing and what it does is that it puts everyone else out of business. What Rushkoff goes on to discuss deserves some thought. His thinking is neither left nor right, nor is is libertarian. It could be described as localism or perhaps Distributism (without the Catholic underwriting). He goes on to say that the answer to many of our problems is to act locally, buy locally, and support our communities. We gotta think small...When you want to do one teeny little thing, you come up against the obstacles that need to be changed. It's only the tiny ideas that work. It's our addiction to big ideas, our addiction to some giant movement -- institutional change, "march on Washington", the idea that we're dependent on Obama for a better life -- is itself the problem. The fact is, we do have the means to care for each other, to grow food, to educate each other, to do the very basic things that people need to enrich their lives. And once you start looking for them in the smallest of ways..it ends up rippling out in ways that you just wouldn't believe. Truth be told, this perspective is shared by many of us at the HTA. All we want is to use our hands to make and sell children's products. Doing this one simple ting, we've run into a really big obstacle that needs to be changed--the CPSIA. |
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Douglas Rushkoff, author of Life Inc., puts the CPSIA in a larger contextposted Sep 8, 2009 10:58 PM by dan marshall |