Your fantasies are beautiful, but unlikely.

As much as I appreciate Senator Dodd ‘s sentiment as relayed in this Sadly, No! post, in practice it suffers from a couple of slight problems, namely that it is completely impossible to implement, and that even if it weren’t it misapprehends the nature of the problem.

Firstly, keeping the problem goods out of the country by blocking “Chinese” products is like King Canute ordering back the tide. Fantasies of standing athwart a chasm-spanning bridge and shouting “You shall not pass!” to a Balrog made out of tainted dogfood and improperly secured magnets are just that, fantasies. Sure, with some effort you could stop all shipping containers labeled “To: America, From: China”. But what about a device from country A containing a component from country B that includes a part assembled in country C but imported from China? What about more-or-less fungible food ingredients? The pedigrees of consumer products are murky enough as it is–imagine their opacity were there to be such an obvious financial benefit in their obfuscation.

And secondly, even if we did manage to keep all such object spawned in that dread land from tainting our pristine shores, where exactly do you expect the replacements are going to be made — France? The problem is structural–producing worthless plastic shit at a cost that allows you to sell it for a profit requires that it be made in a place where a product safety inspection is making sure that the shipment of My Little Ponies is not on fire when it leaves the loading dock, and wher a good work environment is one in which you supervisor is required to inform you as to why you are about to be beaten with a hose. The razor thin profit margins on which these manufacturers rely to make a living all but guarantee that the corners cut in the process will themselves have all their angular edges expertly trimmed. They cannot afford not to.

In the end, you can’t solve the problems caused by the widespread buying of worthless plastic shit by negotiating about the manner in which said worthless plastic shit is obtained. You solve them by buying less worthless plastic shit. That’s really the only viable way.

Parallels

Shorter Al-Qaeda: “How dare you honor the work of an extremely talented artist whose opinions I disagree with!”

Shorter John J. Miller: “How dare you honor the work of an extremely talented artist whose opinions I disagree with!”

Remember, it’s not art if you don’t like the artist.

And what boundary was that, again?

“This bill would support the taking of innocent human life of the hope of finding medical benefits for others. It crosses a moral boundary that our society needs to respect, so I vetoed it,” Bush said.

In other words, killing an innocent person to save the lives of others crosses a bright line, and is always wrong, not matter what. Got it.

It’s interesting, though, that you didn’t mention that such a line had been crossed last month, when we nailed the Big Z:

Four other people, including a woman and a child, were killed with al-Zarqawi and Abu Abdul-Rahman al-Iraqi, the terrorist’s spiritual consultant.

That’s funny, I could have sworn there was a boundary here a minute ago, but now it’s just completely vanished. Odd, that. I mean, we killed a very bad man—which, while not a great thing in and of itself, was better than letting him live—thereby saving scores of lives. The problem is, we had to kill an innocent to save them, and I had been lead to believe that was wrong.

You know what, Mr. President, I think I see a way to a compromise here. If you’ll let us research embryonic stem cells, we’ll promise to blow up the embryos with tiny little bombs first. Deal?