Thursday, January 6, 2011

The Henry Waxman Horror Show: No Longer Playing


Writing at the blog of the libertarian Cato Institute, Walter Olson brings down the curtain on Henry Waxman’s (D-Calif.) chairmanship of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee. Waxman’s position disappeared along with his party’s House majority in November’s epic repudiation of government-gone-wild. His post, titled in a somewhat mixed cultural metaphor, “The Fall of the House of Waxman”, has excellent news for perfume enthusiasts:
The committee was an unending source of ghastly new legislative proposals for regulatory manacles to be fastened on one or another sector of the economy, ideas that with any luck we may now be spared for the next two years. Thus it appears unlikely that the Republican-led committee will give its blessing to something called the Safe Cosmetics Act of 2010 (H.R. 5786), introduced by Reps. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), and Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.), which — by mandating that all compounds found in personal-care items at any detectable level be expensively tested for and disclosed on labels — could have added tens of thousands of dollars of cost overhead to that little herbal-soap business your sister is trying to start in her garage. (Fragrance expert Robert Tisserand explains why most small personal-care product makers would not survive if the bill passed).
B. Daniel Blatt seconds the emotion over at Gay Patriot. And hats off to Robert Tisserand for presenting a powerful case against H.R. 5786.

In America we still have a government answerable to the will of the people. In the EU, the unelected bureaucrats busily spinning mile upon mile of red tape around perfumery ingredients are answerable to no one.

I'll give you my scent blotter when you pull it from my cold dead hands.

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