I am now using a Droid phone.

My whole life is on this device. My “real” email accounts and my “fake” ones – they’re all Gmail accounts and linked on the Gmail app. My phone numbers, credit card information and my real name. Facebook , blogs and tweets. It’s all conveniently tied together and linked to me (within a meter of my actual global position).

Google now has more on me than the United States Government. Comforting in that they’ll probably offer a better franchise, but can I trust them?

Certainly someone at Google has the ability to listen to and record everything I say or write on that phone. Have you used Google’s voice services? It’s no longer necessary to type text messages on a keyboard. Simply push a button and talk – the phone translates words into text and very rarely gets one wrong. This software can easily be programmed to listen all day long and perk up when it hears keywords – like “bomb”, “Jihad” or “Spaghetti Monster”.

I figure there are unlimited dystopian scenarios that arise from such an entanglement with Google. Go ahead and list a few. I have several. Naturally, there are also unlimited Utopian scenarios. List a few, I dare you.

The only way this ends well for me is to accept personal responsibility for my privacy and disentangle my life from Google.

This means I have to learn how to build my own server, host my own email, root my phone and install Linux on my computer. It’s possible, but it’s way harder.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

I stumbled across an interesting article on eggs yesterday while sitting in Borders reading up on something I’m going to be doing an in depth series of posts on. Apparently a study at the USDA has shown that factory farm eggs are far less nutritious than pastured eggs. I don’t know what causes this… although one can imagine the havoc that living in a cage your entire life that is barely bigger than your body, having your beak cut off and breathing in air so foul your whole life that people need to wear an environmental suit when they go in to the building you live in would do to your body and what it produces.

The numbers are quite compelling. Chickens that are let out to pasture produce eggs with:

1/3 less cholesterol
1/4 less saturated fat
2/3 more vitamin A
Two times more omega-3 fatty acids
Three time more vitamin E
Seven times more beta carotene
Three to six times more vitamin D

Now some would take these numbers and offer the idea that we should only allow these kinds of eggs to market. I would disagree, although it would seem fair to require that the difference in nutritional value be prominently placed on packaging. I think people should know exactly what they are getting. Eggs provide a cheap source of protein, and helped me afford that necessary part of my diet through a period where I was low on money, but now that this isn’t an issue, I will certainly switch.

In related news, a New Jersey man is suing Denny’s over the high salt content in their food. I’ve read a handful of articles about this, and I’m still confused as to what exactly he is suing over. As far as I know there is no law that requires restaurants to disclose the salt content of their meals, and frankly, when I eat out at a low quality chain restaurant like that I accept the fact that I’m going to get something cheap that is probably pretty terrible for me. I fail to understand what law they are breaking by offering these foods, and while I completely agree that it is a good idea to have nutritional information for customers (potentially on the menu), it strikes me as something that should be  proposed through the legislature, not forced through by judicial fiat.

So what do you think about this?

Should a customer be able to sue a restaurant because its food is unhealthy?

What should labeling be required to show, and where should it be placed?

After months of pleas from the small business community, the New York Times (the so-called paper of record) finally decided to cover some of the central elements of the legislation. Except that it was not an article discussing the potential costs of the legislation; nor was it even an article discussing the debate over the legislation at all. No. It was an unsigned editorial. Alleging that CPSIA hasn’t been enforced aggressively enough, and that therefore the commissioner of the CPSC must go. Any reading of the editorial makes clear that the Times did not bother to research what the law actually says or how it is supposed to be implemented. Instead, it appears that they merely regurgitated the talking points of the handful of Dem politicians and interest groups who continue to support the law in the face of overwhelming evidence that it is an abject lesson in the problem of unintended consequences.

Not surprisingly, Walter Olson is angry. He zones in on one particularly offensive paragraph of the editorial and destroys it.

Well, I’m pretty angry myself. So I think it’s worth doing a full fisking of this stinking heap of ignorance. The editorial starts:

The American International Toy Fair in New York City this week has offered the newest and most tantalizing playthings in the world: walking plastic bugs, 3-D coloring sets, even Barbie, now 50 and wearing a golden outfit for the occasion. Yet one question hovered over the fair and its glittering new gizmos. Can the federal government assure consumers that the toys are safe?

Knowing a little bit about the Toy Fair, I can assure you, loyal readers, that the actual question hanging over the Fair was “Does anyone have any idea how you are going to comply with this law when it goes completely into effect without going out of business?”

As many parents, and ultimately manufacturers, learned the hard way, the Bush administration did not make the safety of toys and other products a priority. That led to the recall of millions of toys — some because of lead paint, others because of hazards such as small and powerful magnets that children swallowed. The Obama administration now has an opportunity to fill that regulatory gap by appointing new leadership for the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

So the problem here is that the Bush Administration failed to enforce existing safety laws, thereby leading to the recall of millions of toys? Now, I’m no fan of the Bush Administration, but this seems a little silly. How does the Times think that these toys were recalled? Isn’t the remedy for a prohibited product getting on the market to recall it and to penalize the importer? And isn’t that precisely what happened? And how many injuries were reported as a result of these products getting recalled? The answer is one (sadly it was a death) – except that the product that caused that death was perfectly legal under the then-existing standards, and is actually still legal under the new CPSIA standards since it was made for an adult.

Perhaps the Times is saying that the CPSC should have caught the products before they entered the stream of commerce, if only it had different priorities. This most likely is unrealistic to expect a tiny government agency to accomplish. But one thing is for certain, passing a law that creates unprecedented levels of paperwork for that tiny agency to review is a pretty good way to ensure that the agency will spend an even greater percentage of its resources looking for paperwork errors rather than actual safety hazards.

Last year, Congress passed the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, giving new authority and resources to a shockingly understaffed agency. The law has been described, accurately, as providing the safety net that consumers assumed they already had.

Unfortunately, the commission has yet to implement important aspects of the new law.

Really? So, Congress passes a law that provides unprecedented authority – and responsibility – to a “shockingly understaffed agency” and expects them to implement the entire law within six months – and the Times is shocked, SHOCKED, when the agency is unable to do so within that time frame. But perhaps I’m being unfair to the Times – after all, the law provides the agency with “new resources” as well. One problem – the agency didn’t actually get new resources until several months later, and the “new resources” are added incrementally over the course of six years. So the idea that CPSIA’s problems are merely a result of a lazy CPSC is patently false…..and that all says nothing about the fact that CPSC regulations, like all regulations, are subject to a sixty day notice and comment period before they can be implemented.

The delay has caused confusion and allowed opponents to foment needless fears that the law could injure smaller enterprises like libraries, resale shops and handmade toy businesses.

This is the most offensive paragraph. For a full explanation of why, see Walter Olson’s post. But simply put, the idea that any business would threaten to close and/or actually throw out thousands of dollars of inventory upon which they rely to make a living merely because of “needless fears” fomented by shadowy opponents is utterly absurd. Indeed, the guidance that the CPSC has issued on this point, far from being overly soft on product safety, specifically recommends that businesses owners discard many of these products.

The law provides ways to address such concerns without undercutting its new and vitally important protections against lead or other toxic substances in children’s products. Even so, the commission decided last month to delay for a year any real enforcement of the law, which was supposed to have taken effect on Feb. 10.

First of all, the law DID take effect on February 10 – what was stayed for a year was the enforcement of two or three specific elements of the law, including the certification and testing requirements. The lower lead limits and ban on phthalates – even for products intended for use by children with no realistic chance of ingesting the substances – still apply, with extremely stiff penalties for violations. Also – the new law deputizes State Attorneys General; while the CPSC has requested the states hold off on enforcement of the testing and certification requirements, there’s no guarantee they will do so.

As for the alleged “ways of address[ing] such concerns,” proponents of the law never seem to specify what, exactly, these ways are. To be sure, the law allows the CPSC to exempt some products from the lower lead requirements – but this allowance only applies, so far as I’m aware, to the lower lead requirements (and certification thereof). In addition, the CPSC may only exempt “specific product[s] or material[s]” “after notice and a hearing….on the basis of the best available, objective, peer-reviewed, scientific evidence….” In other words, it’s not as if the CPSC is allowed to just categorically exempt any products for which this law would be an undue and unnecessary burden.

President Obama must quickly replace the commission’s acting chairwoman, Nancy Nord, who opposed adding new resources and authority to her agency. He should then choose the kind of enlightened leadership that every parent and toy lover needs and that will give consumer safety the priority it deserves.

Because the idea that Congress may have just put forward a poorly drafted law with no consideration of how it would affect small business is just too simple.

Cross-posted at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen

Hello Donklephants! I’m Mark, and I regularly blog at (and run) the site Publius Endures.

Ostensibly I self-identify as a libertarian, although I’m not terribly dogmatic and tend not to write much on the more common libertarian themes, focusing instead on taking a sober look at the relationships between interest groups (which I define broadly) and political parties, the way in which political coalitions are formed, and the way in which laws and regulations are affected by interest group politics.

My most recent piece at Publius Endures dealt with a piece of legislation that largely fell under the radar: the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008, which I argued needs significant revisions regardless of your political viewpoint. I have a much better piece (read: actual journalism!) up as of this afternoon at the excellent conservative site Culture11. The act, passed with almost no opposition, appears to represent the confluence of good intentions gone wrong, poor legislative incentives, and bad economics, with the added bonus of being particularly devastating to small and medium-sized domestic businesses. In other words, as enacted, the legislation should offend the sensibilities of almost any ideology.

The basic facts of the legislation appear, at first glance, to be quite reasonable. In essence (and although it also addresses several other subjects), the legislation is a response to the imported toy scandals of 2007, in which several mass-produced toys had to be recalled for containing levels of lead far in excess of the legal limits. As a result, near-unanimous passage of the legislation was almost guaranteed from the start – after all, who wants to be FOR lead in childrens’ toys in an election year?

The problems arise in the actual details of the legislation, which are voluminous and, worse, vague. As I write in the Culture11 piece (please do go read the whole thing!):

The biggest problem, perhaps, is that the law implements a new third party testing requirement on every SKU number of every children’s product (including individual titles of children’s books), testing that can run anywhere from a few hundred dollars to tens of thousands of dollars, depending on the type of product. It is unclear how often this testing will be required; however, the wording of the legislation suggests that it could be as often as every outgoing shipment. What is clear, however, is that large imported shipments will only need to be tested upon their arrival in the U.S.

The new law also requires a new type of labeling on all children’s products, in which these products must be stamped with various information for tracking the product, including the date of production. While seemingly easy to comply with, this will actually require expensive retooling for manufacturing machines. The law further mandates that suppliers provide their distributors with certifications for each shipment of each product, a bureaucratic nightmare that many businesses will likely violate occasionally due to simple human error. Yet punishments for violations of the law are draconian — $100,000 minimum fines for each violation up to $15 million, plus possible criminal sanctions. In addition, it is still possible that the law will be implemented in such a way as to turn some pre-existing inventory into contraband when the law takes effect on February 10, 2009 (unless this changes, existing inventory would have to be discarded, immediately driving many businesses to close and/or default on loans).

The piece goes on to discuss the way in which this legislation was passed, and how free market advocates can prevent legislation such as this in an era where “deregulation” is a four-letter word.

For those answers you’ll have to read the whole thing, but I did want to discuss something here that was not relevant to my point in that piece.

One of the most amazing things that came out during the course of my research was just how little this law is going to do to improve toy safety – indeed, it will most likely make children’s products more dangerous by causing the CPSC to focus on catching paperwork errors instead of finding dangerous products. This is true even though the bill significantly increases the agency’s budget.

Even more amazing was just how easily Congress could have passed legislation that actually would have improved safety. The people I interviewed for the article agreed that one of the best things that could have been done in the wake of the toy scandal was to force the CPSC to better prioritize its enforcement responsibilities. In essence, one of the reasons so many lead-laden toys got through last year was that the agency treats most enforcement issues as being created equal (unless, of course, there’s a death involved). This encourages a focus on finding problems that are easily found, but are usually relatively harmless – things like paperwork errors, for instance. It’s the same type of problem Megan McArdle says faced the SEC with respect to the Madoff case. Instead of fixing this problem, the legislation actively makes it worse by giving CPSC more technicalities to enforce.

Another possible solution that was mentioned to me was the idea of “component testing.” Under component testing (which the CPSC actually is, apparently, considering in some form), you require testing only of individual components instead of the final product. This is less costly on a per-test basis and allows manufacturers to make multiple products using the same components. So, for instance, a small children’s book publisher would only need to test its ink, paper, and coverboard rather than having to test every single title.

Yet neither of these easy solutions was even considered by Congress. Instead, one of my sources told me that Congress’ response to just about any proposed changes or objections was, effectively, “the National Association of Manufacturers is on board, as are Hasbro and Mattel, so we don’t really care what you think.”

This presents a major problem for small business (unless one of the major parties adopts something akin to the position I advocated in my Culture11 piece), to wit: How do small businesses defend themselves against onerous laws and regs when they can’t get a seat at the table?

One obvious answer is to organize into a more focused advocacy group, but even this doesn’t always get you a seat at the table. For instance, so far as I can tell (though I’m not 100% certain), the Apparel and Footwear Association (which, unlike other advocacy groups, is not dominated by its biggest members) did spend a substantial amount of effort pushing for changes to the legislation. Yet none of those changes made it through, suggesting they received essentially the same response.

And, finally, some breaking news. I just now found out that the National Association of Manufacturers (which supported the legislation) is petitioning the CPSC to implement regs that would eliminate a lot of the hardship to be caused by this law. I have to think about what this means…but I don’t think it’s inconsistent with the explanation I gave in my C11 piece.

(Excerpts cross-posted at Publius Endures)

This time its maggots in chocolate?

Listen, it’s not like American made goods haven’t had problems, but China is really taking it on the chin lately and for good reason. Consumers are becoming increasingly more uncomfortable trusting their health to a country with seemingly such lax standards on what they export.

From Reuters:

Courtesy of TheNewsRoom.