Over at Overlawyered, pundit Walter Olson laces into the NY Times for not being "...a day late and a dollar short, but more like 300 days late and many billions of dollars in overlooked costs short. He goes on, "Still, let's be grateful: the paper's news side has now implicitly rebuked the editorial side's fantastic, ideologically blinkered dismissal of "needless fears that the law could injure smaller enterprises."
Olson has been on the CPSIA beat since the beginning, and his relatively positive take on this turn of events is encouraging. However, part of me thinks that the real purpose of the NY Times editorial is to appear sympathetic while giving its Lefty readership an "in the field" portrayal of those poor quaint family businesses that will just have to be sacrificed on the altar of the great Utopian experiment (read: a socialist power-mad government).
The lesson of CPSIA is that a bill can have 106 co-sponsors, and not a single one of them gave one second's thought to the consequences of their handiwork. CPSIA, like no other bill in the past 50 years, gives you a stark picture of how stupid and feckless Congress really is. More than that, of those members who may have had doubts, they were all too craven to express them, lest they be thought of as being against children's health.
Run health care? They couldn't even write a bill that limited the amount of lead and phthalates in toys!
Comments