2008 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."

Killfile - thanks for the seed. Sounds expensive and will further hurt the economy. Government's authority to invade individual space in the name of public safety is amazing. This issue is so complex, I do not have a concrete opinion. Individual responsibility --where does it start? Government oversight? where does it stop?

Well, part of the thrust towards tight product regulation comes from the industry itself, as it is some sort of protectionism.

In practice, US corporations, strangled by the risk of product libaility lawsuits find it difficult to lower production costs and compete with Chinese or other import products whose liable importer is a letterbox and whose manufacturer sits on the other side of the globe, well shielded by a corrupt judiciary.

Norms and standards have been used with frequency as a soft protectionst tool and this over many decades. My initial conclusion would be that bottomline they save American jobs, even if on occasion, new regulations may produce temporary losses.

If the federal government doesn't regulate product safety who will. Industry has demonstrated time and again it will not effectively self regulate. As long as there is a dynamic conflict between product safety and profit, profit will win and product safety, and the consumer, will lose.

Oh no! Onerous testing requirements!

Yeah, it's far better to allow companies to manufacture whatever they want and put it on the market, even if it can poison and kill people.

Too f'n bad for business! I'd rather not be poisoned. They shouldn't have been making products with poisonous substances in the first place.

My first - and only - sympathy lies with the consumer.

My interpretation of this is that it hurts your "handcrafters' here in America not big business in China and overseas.

Just some insight into the little I know of product testing. The company sends a "sample" to be the buyer for testing. If it meets criteria then order is placed. Testing lab then "buys" product at random from actual store shelves and re-tests at periodic intervals (I didn't get the exact criteria by item) and if random product "fails" then more testing, recalls, or whatever happens.

So thousand, hundreds of thousands products are potentially shipped that do not meet any safety standards whatsoever, but until someone dies, becomes ill or is injured we are all playing Russian roulette as far as safety is concerned.

Consider the milk poisoning in China, and then consider what happened to the farmers who were responsible. They don't seem to tolerate harming their own, and lives of those responsible are forfeited instead of money. While that may seem harsh, these people did actually KILL for a profit.