Evil Chinese Date Rape Toys
The greatest magazine in the world, Reason, has a story up about the recent spate of Chinese product recalls.
If you’re inclined to confuse peaceful exchange with forceful invasion, China’s domination of the toy industry will indeed seem alarming. Between 70 and 80 percent of toys sold in America pass through China. An analysis by Canadian economists Hari Bapuji and Paul Beamish found that as of September .05 percent of these Chinese-made toys had been recalled. That’s a lot of toys, and it is an increase even when considered in the context of the increase in Chinese toy imports overall. But it’s also a smaller percentage of toys than was recalled from non-China countries as of September, according to the same analysis. Bapuji and Beamish find that 0.7 percent of non-Chinese toy imports were recalled, many from countries far less likely to be demonized, such as India and South Korea.
Can only Westerners be trusted? Hardly; nearly three-quarters of the toy recalls are attributable to American and European designs. The Barbie and Tanner toy mentioned above, for example, features a plastic dog that defecates after a child stuffs putty-like biscuits into its front orifice. Barbie’s pooper scooper harbors a small magnet between pieces of blue plastic. The magnets, which can cause severe intestinal damage if swallowed in multiples, are a component of the directions Mattel gave the factories with which it contracted. Blaming China for these flaws is something like blaming an ugly building on a bricklayer.
The concerns about lead paint, by contrast, are directly attributable to factories in Guangdong. But even here, blaming “China” evokes a Fisher-Price vision of a world delineated into brightly colored, non-overlapping geometric shapes. As Hasbro CEO Alan Hassenfeld puts it, “Companies manufacture, import and sell products; countries do not.” To take just Mattel’s August 2 recall of Fisher-Price toys contained dangerous amounts of lead, the factory that Mattel dealt with directly—Lee Der Industrial—appears to be honest. The paint suppliers Lee Der contracted with also appear to be honest. The culprit was three links down the chain, involving a crooked supplier of pigment to one of the paint companies supplying Lee Der. Brands lost touch with their complex supply chains. The trail of guilt runs along those chains, and does not extend far beyond them.
This gets to the heart of something near and dear to my heart, overregulation of business. While China is indeed a police state, and their bureaucracy is truly something to be marveled for its sheer size and scope, there’s what I’ve described as the the “oddly libertarian” aspect to life here. Take my apartment complex, for example. From where the taxi drops me off to the front door of my building I have to walk down one set of stairs, across a courtyard, then up another set of stairs. It’s about a three minute trek. Before you get to the first set of stairs there is sort of a shallow trench cut into the sidewalk. They have run some kind of pipes into the ground, obviously on a temporary basis, and apparently aren’t going to re-pave the area until the work is complete. I tripped over it a couple of times when I first moved in. You’d never see this in America because of the liability it would open for the company. Some numbnuts would be walking along, not watching where he was going, trip over the trench, and then the complex would have a lawsuit on its hands.
The first set of stairs, near the health club, has no lighting. At night it’s damn near pitch black. There are no handrails, nor those little reflector things to show you where the edges of the stairs are. You just have to pay attention to what you’re doing or you’re going to end up going ass over teakettle. Then, as you walk across the courtyard, there are a couple of concrete things sticking up out of the ground about six inches. I don’t know what they’re for, presumably the base for some future object, but they’re very easy to trip over. Again, you have to pay attention to where you’re walking. The final set of steps, as well as the rest of the trip to my door, is well-lighted.
The thing is, I find this danger curiously refreshing. It’s nice being treated like a sentient being, with the ability to take care of myself, rather than as some drooling idiot who can’t pay attention to where he walks. Remember, America is the country where screwdrivers come with warnings like “Do not stick in eye” solely to protect the company against legal liability when some dumbass inevitably does so.
Now, let’s look at this in the context of restaurants. When I lived in Los Angeles there was a huge scandal involving corruption and incompetence at the LA County Board of Health, the agency responsible for inspecting restaurants for food safety. One of the local news stations did an undercover investigation and found that some of LA’s finest restaurants had rats and cockroaches in the kitchens. The board of health was grossly underfunded, its agents taking bribes to allow restaurants to open, and so on. The public was outraged, and immediate reforms were in place. Whether these have had any tangible effect I have no idea, but they give the appearance of having an effect, and in politics the essence is more important than the existence, to paraphrase Jean-Paul Sartre.
Compare this with China. Yes, they ostensibly have food safety inspectors here, but the general rule of thumb is “Never sit in a restaurant at any table where you can see into the kitchen.” God only knows what they’d have in there—live chickens and rabbits in cages, that sort of thing. I imagine that their food standards are quite a bit lower than ours.
Here’s the thing. Since coming to Beijing I’ve had some of the best food in my life. I haven’t had a single case of food poisoning. I feel terrific. So this leads to the inevitable question: if Beijing is able to provide clean, healthy food with minimal regulations (or minimal enforcement of a larger set of regulations) then it proves that the regulations weren’t really necessary in the first place. The solution is simple—if I go to a restaurant and get a bad meal, I tell all my friends to avoid it. Eventually it gets a reputation, the expats stop going, and it closes down. Adam Smith strikes again.
There are a billion and a half Chinese. Obviously they’re not all dropping like flies because of an inferior food supply, especially here in the cities. Yes there are dodgy, disgusting restaurants, and the solution is to just avoid eating there. It’s Milton Friedman in action—you’re free to choose whether you eat there, and they’re free to choose what to serve. Some people (like me) would rather pay a higher cost for better food. Others, including a number of expats, will choose to eat at the dodgy restaurants, partly for financial reasons and partly because it adds to their “Chinese street cred.”
The point I’m making here is that, in the US, we have so many regulations for so many things, and compliance with these regulations costs an incredible amount of money. These costs are passed on to the consumer in the form of higher prices. Are the benefits of these regulations worth the price we pay for them? My time in Los Angeles shows that, even in one of the biggest cities in the wealthiest nation in the world, with countless regulations concerning food safety, crappy food will inevitably end up being sold. Safety is, therefore, a relative illusion. Conversely, my experience in Beijing shows that we could probably do away with a lot of regulations if we as a society started placing a greater emphasis on the responsibilities of the individual as well as his rights. Here in China you’re responsible for making sure you don’t bust your ass when you walk down the street. If you trip over something, it’s because you didn’t watch where you were walking. And if you eat at a dodgy restaurant, just don’t eat there again.
Earlier this year I was the foreman on a jury trial in Los Angeles. The case involved an alleged hit and run injury. Basically the defendant was coming down Queens Blvd. in Hollywood and came to the intersection with Sunset and wanted to turn right. (See the Google Map of the intersection.) As anyone who has driven in a city knows, when you’re turning right like this you have to look left to monitor the traffic as you pull in. As the defendant began to pull forward, the plaintiff walked right in front of him and was knocked over. He wasn’t sent flying, he just fell backwards. He was suing for past medical bills, future medical bills, and the infamous “pain and suffering.”
As a matter of law we found that since the plaintiff was on a crosswalk the defendant was technically at fault. As such we awarded the plaintiff his past medical expenses, and we gave him (if I remember correctly) about $10,000 for future expenses. But we all agreed that, in principle, the guy was a moron for walking out in front of a car which was turning right, so when it came to pain and suffering we gave him a big fat zero. Nada. Zilch.
In America, as in most of the west, we have this idea that if we just pass a new law, why, we’ll all be safer! Whether it’s laws regarding evil plastic Chinese date rape toys, or fingerprinting British citizens who are trying to come to Disneyland for a holiday, the principle is exactly the same—how much these laws will cost us (either in terms of finances or liberty) versus how much they will benefit us. As my experience in China shows, and as any good capitalist can tell you, usually minimal regulations provide a comparable, and often superior, result. What minimal regulations do not provide is the opportunity for politicians to show that they’re “doing something.” You can’t point to a law you didn’t pass as an accomplishment. (Well, to me that would be the greatest thing a politician ever said. “During my term in office I did damn near nothing!")
I’m not advocating abolishing safety standards for toys or health standards for restaurants or anything of that nature. The point is that more laws do not inherently equal better quality, and often times leads not only to a result the opposite of the one desired, but creates situations where the “law of unintended consequences” comes into play. There should only be as many laws as are necessary to achieve a desired result. In other words, “limited government,” a concept that seems to have died in the United States along with Barry Goldwater.
