A little commerce glitch

Thursday, 11:23 am

By Kate

Nov

08

2007

Since yesterday, I’ve been reading about these poisonous Aqua Dots toys all over the web. It’s a craft toy—kids can make pretty little objects with different colored dots of some mysterious composition. Trouble is, these construction dots are coated with a chemical that converts to a drug/poison in the human body that is or mimics the date rape drug. Consumed in large enough quantities (as yet unclear how many dots can cause the reaction), children end up in comas in the ICU unit. Or die. Whichever comes first.

Wal-Mart says the toy has been on their list of top 12 toys this year. It’s highly desired. Now it’s being recalled. And, not surprisingly, the toy is manufactured in China.

So, this year, we’ve had our pets poisoned by ingredients manufactured in China (tens of thousands of affected pets, though the mainstream media did its best to obfuscate that fact), we’ve had our children exposed to high levels of lead paint in toys manufactured in China, and now a date rape drug.

Do you think maybe there’s a problem?

Well, yes—not that I expect anything serious to be done about it.

In a world consumed by a free market ideology, anything apparently goes. After plowing through The Shock Doctrine, I am not at all surprised that our government hasn’t done more than offer a few sympathetic noises about these little glitches in commerce. Regulations, of course, are a total anathema to the free market—which would be better termed with the old fashioned laissez-faire. If a few pets and kids die in the support of the free market, well, that’s unfortunate. But sh*t happens. The market will sort it out.

And if you think that’s grossly cynical, you oughta go read the book. Cynical doesn’t even scratch the surface. We live in a world ruled by con artists and money grubbers who don’t give much of damn about you or me or our kids. Since they’ve pretty much run the world into the ground over the last few decades, I suspect that their past is about to catch up with them. At our expense, too, of course, but whatever.

If Dante’s hell were to truly exist (and I wish it did), the free marketers would populate the 7th, 8th, and 9th circles and there would be standing room only. In my opinion, that would be way too good for them.