The CPSC and related regulators CAN regulate dangerous stuff without making idiotic wars on toy magnets that undermine their entire existence. Seriously. They can fulfill their entire function, standards of error for mistakes included, without EVER committing such heinously overregulatory acts as this - in fact, it's important to their continued existence that they DO NOT overregulate this badly (because when they do, their opponents gain substantial ammunition to eventually disband/defang them).
Yes, they're dangerous is you don't follow safety precautions and I would never allow children to play with them. When children visit we make sure the magnets are not accessible - it's our responsibility to think about others' safety. But it's not the responsibility of the magnet manufacturers, as long as they make it clear that their product can be dangerous (and the vendors I've bought from certainly do). The mere fact that something is dangerous is not grounds for taking it off sale, otherwise we should shut down every gas station and hardware store right now.
Why make a distinction between things that are dangerous on accident (defective) vs things that are dangerous by design?
>otherwise we should shut down every gas station and hardware store right now.
Every law or regulation needs to balance the risk to society against the benefit to society. This is a toy.
Because many dangerous things have significant utility. Fire is useful for warming your home and cooking food but can also injure or even kill. Water is essential life but you could suffer from hypothermia or drown. These are things that should be obvious to all adults and most children. If you need to have it spelled out to you then your opinions on the economics of safety are not worth very much.
Every law or regulation needs to balance the risk to society against the benefit to society. This is a toy.
It's not a toy just because you say it is, nor are all toys required to be equally safe or not admit any possibility of injury. Really, it's sad that you think such an assertion constitutes a valid argument.
Maybe you think it's 'just a toy' because you can't conceive of any use for it other than mere amusement. That's your problem, not mine.
Yes, it certainly makes sense to distinguish based on utility, which was the whole point of the second part of my comment, and is why a comparison to gas stations and hardware stores is invalid. Utility is completely orthogonal to "defect vs design".
> It's not a toy just because you say it is
It's a toy because it fits the definition of the word, regardless of how they market it. If it has some purpose other than entertainment, I would love to understand what it is. From my viewpoint, the utility, and therefore the harm caused to society by it being banned, is low. Note how this is different for gasoline and power tools.
Its reasonable to observe social norms, comment on risk vs reward, and suggest different views. Others should not be subject to ridicule and hostile comments for this.
I suggest you take your toy and go home.
This comment is one example of how hard the labelling failed. Buckyballs came with a big label saying "BUCKYBALLS ARE NOT TOYS".
However, it's false to say that EVERY individual regulation meets these criteria. As TFA pointed out, these objects are far less hazardous than firearms, fireworks, automobiles, and even balloons (the leading cause of child suffocation, and for whic labeling is required), but because they are novel the CPSC decided to slap them with an absolute ban, which is stronger regulation than any of the other products listed above and thousands of others.
This was a very badly considered and executed regulation, and the judge acted rightly. FWIW, I don't think anyone is saying what you imply, that all regulations are baseless and bad.
What exactly did I say that made it sound like that?
It seems normal to pursue something that could result in economic benefit, if you have the means to do so. And if there's a larger principle at stake, all the more reason.
Someone who believes that narrative would have expected this guy to lose, pay six figures in legal fees, have a mental breakdown, and the judgement to only come in five years after his magnet company closed down because they couldn't sell their only product.
Personally I don't have enough experience to know whether the US legal system really works that way.
That sounds like an easily made, hard to back up claim.
http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...
"The Costs and Benefits of Regulation: Review and Synthesis" RW Hahn, Yale Journal of Regulation, Volume 8, Issue 1, Article 9, 1991
The above link was the first Google result for (economy-wide costs of regulations journal) for me, and Google notes that it is cited by hundreds of other articles. The first 10 results all seemed to similarly explain that regulations are costly.
The difference is pretty basic: Having a "negative impact" requires value-judgement, having a cost does not. In terms of economics it requires a broad view of the entire economy, whereas a cost can be directly assigned to a single event or series of events.
Saying that a regulation has a cost is saying that it requires some expenditure to implement/maintain. Saying it has a negative impact is saying that the expenditure to implement/maintain that regulation outweighs the as-yet-in-this-discussion undefined benefits of the regulation in question.
>Having a cost and having a "large, economy-wide negative impact" are very different things.
Is a large cost not a large negative impact? Are regulations by the federal government not economy-wide? Are you making any discernible point that couldn't have been expressed by "NUH UH, I'M STILL RIGHT LALALALA!"?
To pick a random example: The article doesn't say it costs shoppers in Des Moines $4,029 per year due to milk-market regulations. It costs US citizens somewhere between $500 million and $2.1 billion per year - in 1991.
The journal article I linked is literally about the large, economy-wide costs of regulations. Your response is a non-sequitor.
Going with your random example plucked from the article... [Milk market regulations] cost US citizens somewhere between $500 million and $2.1 billion per year - in 1991.
Besides the wild variation, so what? That number is meaningless without the context of the size of the milk market as a whole which would allow us to assess the scope of the burden, not to mention some estimate of the likely economic cost of an unregulated milk marketplace (eg economic losses due to illness from disease).
Why do you think it's impressive to pull out a big number like this without any context? It's ridiculous. If we're going to go with cherry-picking argument of this type, I can't help noticing that Americans love milk and almost every American refrigerator I'e ever seen has an open container of milk. So since we're talking about the US as a whole in your example, and there were ~250m Americans in 1991, it seems like these regulations imposed a cost of between $2 and $8 that year on every American...which doesn't sound like all that much to pay for a year of knowing the milk you enjoy is safe to consume. MY household spends about $7-800 a year on dairy products, so back in 1991, and adjusting very generously for inflation, we might have spent $200 to consume the same amount of milk. Using the worst-case number from your paper, positing an upper regulatory burden for every American of $8 and doubling it to represent the two people in my household, maybe $16 of that $200 consisted of regulatory costs. So the worst-case scenario is that regulation drove up the cost of milk by 8%, which doesn't sound like that bad of a trade.
Since I've done all the work here so far perhaps you'd like to estimate the benefits of reliably safe milk in terms of avoided medical costs from dairy-borne pathogens.
Because you replied with a link to something that did not further the point under discussion.
>Is a large cost not a large negative impact?
No, it is not.
>The journal article I linked is literally about the large, economy-wide costs of regulations.
And it appears to mostly disagree with the point you are trying to make.
Well of course, but the comment I responded to questioned the assertion that there is a large, economy-wide cost.
Is the benefit of (cleaner air/safer highways/magnet-free-toys) worth the cost? That's what the debate ought to be about. But first we all have to agree that there is a cost being paid.
No, I did not. The comment I replied to implied a net-negative cost.
When regulation is used to protect people from being taken advantage of, then the benefits are well worth the cost.
These are barriers to trade. And we got to this place with death by a thousand regulation cuts. Can't do this. Can't do that. Cant do this on that day while doing that instead of this, without willing out volumes of forms. And you wonder why compliance costs are stupid high?
(Don't get me wrong, I hold to a mixture of communism and capitalism - I think something like GNU can be done for nearly everything, but there's room for making money as well. I just categorically disagree with the volume of regulations. It makes people criminals via incapability of understanding the law.)
But, seriously: This nightmare is one of the stories we tell each other. But, for most companies, it's just not true.
I've started four or five companies. Mostly software, one that sells actual (government-certified organic) food, one that mostly worked for governments (including the defense sector). In all that time, I've never felt like regulation prevented me from doing anything. Once or twice, I had to submit some form that I thought was overkill. But in fact I doubt there was ever a year where I spend more than two or three days net on government bureaucracy.
I know that the situation may be different for construction or airplane startups (at least I hope it is). But this sort of hyperbole is just a lie that doesn't improve by repetition.
If anything, I've been surprised by how little regulation there sometimes is. Look at AirBnB or Uber or drones: Who would've though that you could (for a time) fly a model airplane in Heathrow's final approach corridor and only get a "we're looking into it and engaging in a dialog with all interested parties" as a reply?
Personally I'm already there with lots of stuff. I'm aware that it's letting certain companies collect rents, but it's generally not worth my time and the extra risk to track down another brand that might be acceptably reliable and safe, assuming they haven't decided to burn whatever little reputation they've built up for some short-term profit by swapping their once-decent product for crap while keeping the price and model info the same after all the reviews I read were written.
That's also a barrier to entry. Economies are tricky things :-/