The government thinks you are stupid.
Here is the latest example.
Health Canada is making instructional videos explaining the duty of garage sale holders to screen every used plate and children’s toy sprinkled across their drive-way for safety.
The rules also apply when selling on line; rules like a mandate to include instructions for safe use.
If I sell you my old lawnmower – which I assure you is in fine working condition and well worth the price – do you really need me to print out instructions to keep your feet out from under the machine and to keep it away from your two year old? Are you that dumb?
And no, I don’t know where the original instruction manual is. It’s a lawnmower. Can you operate it? I think you can. It is the government that thinks you can’t.
If you are selling a crib, now that your kids are all safely grown up, you must, the government instructs, “ include, at the time of sale: information that identifies the manufacturer, model name and number, date of manufacture, instructions for assembling and using the product, as well as warning statements.”
Everybody has that manual, right? That information has to be around here somewhere. You never know when a crib that saw one family safely though the baby stage will rise up and kill someone else’s child.
Health Canada regulations read, “Everyone holding a garage sale in Canada is legally responsible for ensuring that products sold or even given away, whether new or used, are safe and meet current safety standards.”
It is fine, I think, to have consumer safety regulations built into the manufacture and sale of products, but new regulations make no distinction between new and used products.
Everything we buy at the store has already been through the process, so why can’t we eliminate it at the garage sale level? It is redundant.
Health Canada points out that these regulations also apply to hockey helmets, which is terrific, because I am just old enough to have started flopping around on skates just before they made helmets mandatory, and ever since I have not been able to get the hang of that exceedingly complicated piece of equipment.
Thank you Health Canada. Now I can get lessons at my local garage sale.
We have segments of the government obsessed with saving the planet, and now they are clamping down on people willing to recycle rather than re-manufacture.
I am being a bit facetious here, but isn’t it time for the government to stop trying to save us from ourselves?
Do we have to have mountains of regulations aimed at the stupidest people?
It inconveniences the rest of us and shallows the gene pool.
Some communities are passing laws to make it illegal to walk and text on your phone at the same time. They don’t want people wandering out into traffic.
If someone is dumb enough to walk into an intersection and get taken out by a passing truck, it is horrible for the truck driver, but it keeps that person from further reproducing and raises the collective intelligence.
Darwin figured this out in the mid 19th century.
We are getting dumber and dumber as a species.
Government keeps getting bigger and bigger.
I think there is a connection.