Now Pinocchio is hazardous to health?

Image by AFP/Getty Images via Daylife

Add another block to the pavement of well-intentioned stones lining the road to hell: legislation requiring toymakers to use tests to prove their toys are safe.

Of course, this is in response to all those malignant toys that Mattel and others unwittingly (and yes, I believe it was unwitting, i do NOT think that Mattel is run by babykillers) imported from China.  And of course, I am not coming out against child safety here.  But…

Once again, the government goes for one size fits all, and unwittingly –  here, too, I see boneheadedness, not malice — passes rules that will make the fat cats fatter and strike a blow against craftsmen.  The problem: Testing costs money. And ironically, it probably costs big companies less.  Why? Because they already have in-house labs, and adding a few new tests is a tiny incremental cost.  That rustic woodcarver is another story. This quote from a NYTimes piece says it best:

“This is absurd,” said Mr. Woods, whose toys are made of maple, walnut and cherry and finished with walnut oil and beeswax from a local apiary. He estimates it would cost him $30,000 — a figure he calculated from having to pay $400 in required tests for each of the 80 or so different items he produces — to show that they are not toxic.

“I use beeswax,” Mr. Woods said. “The law was targeted at large toymakers using lead. There was no exclusion for benign products.”

Now granted, no one should be able to declare that his product is benign, and then blithely continue producing it.  But there are myriad ways around this. Why not mandate that toymakers below a certain revenue level submit a list of ingredients and components that they use, and get clearance from the commission, end discussion.  Or, how about the government tests their toys for them.  Or the industry passes a voluntary guideline that Mattell and other big guys test the small guys’ stuff at cost — a move that would give the industry kudos and good will way beyond the cost of the testing, so the big companies would probably happily comply.

None of this guards against fraud or malice, of course.  But neither does the new legislation.  Any company that wants to falsify test results can easily do so, and any craftsman can say he’s using sugar when he’s actually using arsenic.  And I won’t even fall back on even-businessmen-have-consciences — even though  I believe they do (I refuse to put financial traders and toy executives into the same category — and my guess is, even bernard madoff or ken lewis would have stopped short at poisoning a child)

I feel safe because this is big business, and these people aren’t imbeciles — they know that if one child gets sick, there will be an investigation, and if their product is implicated — and they cannot prove they were victimized too — the jig is up.  And even if they didn’t care about kids, they’d do the right thing to preserve their salaries and bonuses and stock options (or in the case of the craftsmen, their beloved hobbies or their sole source of livelihood.