Our government’s idiotic assault on personal liberty and freedom continues. Remember, it’s for the children. All kinds of curbs on liberty can be foisted off on the American public when the government uses the phrase, ‘It’s for the children.’ Immediately women and manginas will meekly accept any incoherent rational for less freedom. James Rosen of McClatchy Newspapers reports:
As part of a campaign called Resale Roundup, the federal government is cracking down on the secondhand sales of dangerous and defective products.The initiative, which targets toys and other products for children, enforces a new provision that makes it a crime to resell anything that’s been recalled by its manufacturer.
Sounds plausible enough, doesn’t it? Except anyone with children will tell you it’s impossible to keep track of all the items that may be recalled. That’s a lot of time and effort that could be spent on better things.
The crackdown affects sellers ranging from major thrift-store operators such as Goodwill and the Salvation Army to everyday Americans cleaning out their attics for yard sales, church bazaars or – increasingly – digital hawking on eBay, Craigslist and other Web sites.
More crap sent to the landfill. Goody!
Scott Wolfson, a spokesman for the agency (ed: That’d be the consumer product safety commision), said it wouldn’t be dispatching bureaucratic storm troopers (ed: emphasis added) into private homes to see whether people were selling recalled products from their garages, yards or churches.
Nice turn of phrase there, isn’t it. Nothing to see here, we really don’t have bureaucratic storm troopers at our disposal.
“We’re not looking to come across as being heavy-handed,” he said. “We want to make sure that everybody knows what the rules of engagement are to help spur greater compliance, so that enforcement becomes less of an issue. But we’re still going to enforce.”
Translation: We will be heavy handed, but just don’t call it that.
The commission’s Internet surveillance unit is monitoring Craigslist and other “top auction and reselling sites” for recalled goods. If the agency discovers that a recalled product has been sold online, it will try to find and inform the buyer, Wolfson said.
Thank you big brother. What would we do without you?
