Our Federal government is always hungry for access to innovative restrictions upon our lives, especially when levies are exacted for the privilege. The child car seat has evolved from a not bad idea - a few dozen children are otherwise preventably killed in auto accidents annually - into a billion dollar regulatory, punitive, and remunerative pork barrel. Little imagination is needed to extrapolate the full depth of Washington's footsteps when it can recruit bleeding heart liberals and idle industries, and take a cut of their swag as well. When you are a bureaucrat waging the pecuniary equivalent of war against the electorate, appanage is yours to behold.
President Barack Obaama's national healthcare insurance bill snugged 3000 densely wordprocessed pages. Everywhere in those 3000 pages of bureaucrtic corruption and dynamic incompetence were requirements for payment and vast heinous penalties for non-compliance. Nowhere in those 3000 pages of bureaucrtic corruption and dynamic incompetence were requirements for the insured receiving reimbursement for medical bills. Maybe in the next 3000 pages... around the year 2525.
Zeus possessed aegis, his unbreachable shield, lending it to his daughter Athena and occasionally to Apollo. We have the Department of Transportation to continuously impose its will. I would personally prefer the goatskin.
Government regulators typically commence by requiring, for our own good, that every car have built into it at the minimum one Federally mandated and approved child seat. Wouldn't you childless folk gladly volunteer an extra $700 (plus increased sales tax and annual license and registration fees) to assure the presence of a $50 child seat in every car? We can be sure that, in the manner of air bags, the first child seat will be installed on the driver's side. You might even get a little yellow diamond to proudly display stuck to your window, at no extra charge!
Designing said seats to operationally implement discernible child protection, while an unnecessary apotropaic embellishment, was deemed essential to put a proper spin on the revenue enhancement. It sent a message. Having no data-laden anthropomorphic model from which to fashion an inanimate but biomimetically responsive instrumented simulacrum - a crash dummy - the researchers started with baboons. This triggered such a stink from Animal Rights activists (loud morons), baboons being in worldwide short supply and children being noisomely abundant, that rutabagas were substituted. Thousands of hours of computer analysis underlined the imperfect correspondence between a squishy two year old and a solid turnip.
Mesh bags stuffed with broccoli and cauliflower were substituted. You engineers know how important mesh analysis is. Years of overpriced research conducted by government drones too inept to retain employment in the private sector were summarized in 200 copies of a five thousand page report. Three copies were retained. The rest were consigned to stabilize the geotextile lining of a SuperFund landfill site.
How lucky we are that across the breadth of this great nation there are crammed mammoth warehouses bulging with recycled polyethylene (PE), poly(vinyl chloride) (PVC), and poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET) reclaimed from discarded sandwich bags, broken sprinkler systems, and scrapped soft drink bottles, respectively. For each tax dollar spent on recycling a national average of sixteen paltry cents is returned on sale, when and if, of collected materials. The raw materials for quality child restraint seats were thus in abundant supply at only six times the cost of purchasing virgin resins, thanks to OMB and GAO intervention. It was a dogmatically Enviro-whiner proper thing to do!
(Enviro-whinerism is that ideology based upon the opposite of being productive. It took a while for government to get on the bandwagon. You know how it is, fish swimming in water...)
The administrative infrastructure and enforcement modalities are all funded and in place. The forms have been distributed in multiplicate according to the precepts of the National Paperwork Reduction Act, with attached duplicate receipts (carbonless!) to verify compliance. Laws have been passed to fine and imprison those who would tamper with the seats, and to require annual performance inspections and compliance certificates for a reasonable service charge. Hardened tool steel injection molds, serially numbered with Mil Spec approval, cover acres of storage, awaiting their use. Millions of pounds of formulated plastic sit prilled, dried, sieved, disinfected, deodorized, pigmented, ultraviolet-stabilized, antioxidized, Ames-tested, DOT and OSHA certified for use, and ready to go. Multi-year contracts have been let for storage and transportation of the finished seats. The behemoth of American industry, the cornucopian juggernaut that vanquished Hitler and Hirohito, awakens.
OK folks, who wants to buy an American car? We have millions of them gathering dust (which is to say, EPA-sanctioned particulates)! Anybody who does not volunteer will get a Toyota - with braking and acceleration software upgrades!