govt plays Scrooge in squashing small business through toy regulations

From Walter Block in the WSJ...

Last Thursday, the House Energy and Commerce Committee finally held a hearing on the highly controversial Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, the children's-product-safety law that took effect on Feb. 10. Chairman Henry Waxman (D., Calif.) allowed a single witness: Inez Tenenbaum, the newly installed chair of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), who, like himself, is a strong advocate of the law. Not one of the thousands of craftspeople, retailers and small manufacturers the law has sent reeling was permitted to testify.

This law has saddled businesses with billions of dollars in losses on T-shirts, bath toys and other items that were lawful to sell one day and unlawful the next....

Yielding to a business outcry, the agency postponed until next February the law's highly onerous product-testing requirements...Nevertheless, the law's latest shock hit businesses on Aug. 14. That's when the law's tracking-label mandate went into effect...

Why did Congress rush to pass this bill, and why is it so reluctant to amend a law whose burdens fall mostly on products that have never been linked to poisoning? One reason is the skill of antibusiness groups claiming to speak for consumers. Groups such as Public Citizen and the Public Interest Research Group seized on and promoted the Chinese toy panic for their own legislative ends...