Whipped Cream Difficulties

Picked this up from Overlawyered, and thought it deserved wider circulation.

Woman and a friend are having coffee. Friend mentions that her daughter just had her first baby. The daughter works in a job that pays just above minimum wage, so money is tight. Daughter stretches her money by shopping the second-hand market for baby stuff. But daughter can’t find any used cribs for sale.

I had to tell my friend that her daughter could not find a second-hand crib because the CPSC basically outlawed selling them. The CPSC has put in place a new safety standard for cribs and, by the law’s terms, all cribs, regardless of when they were made or where they are sold, must meet these new standards. Because the standard is fairly new, cribs meeting the new standard have not yet cycled down to the resale market. And because of the standard, the new cribs are quite expensive, so they will probably be used for a long time before they are available to be bought second-hand. Therefore, those consumers who count on the resale market for their basic needs—such as a crib—are out of luck.

Daughter is trying to make do with a used “play yard”. “One of its sides is broken but it has been mended with a metal rod and tape.” Not the safest thing in the world.

Here’s the punchline: the author of that blog entry is CPSC commissioner Nancy Nord.

This conversation led me to wonder if we as Commissioners are doing as much as we should to consider the full consequences of our decisions.

I’m willing to bet that people warned commissioner Nord, and the other commissioners, that this kind of thing would happen: you dry up the used crib market, and people are going to resort to alternatives that may be even less safe than a used crib. I’m also willing to bet that commissioner Nord ignored those warnings. I’m glad she’s had her moment on the road to Damascus, but it seems to me to be too little, too late.