Common Sense with Paul Jacob

Buckyballs are little round magnets that can be sculpted into intricate geometrical patterns, providing responsible adults good clean fun.

Though marketed to adults, and despite the company’s extensive informational systems to discourage their use by unsupervised children, Buckyballs were indeed ingested by a few kids, alas. The ultimate misuse.

Even if you haven’t read those few horror stories — thankfully, no deaths have been reported, something you can’t say for drape drawstrings, tricycles, and bathtubs — you can probably imagine the huge havoc little magnets can wreak in little intestines.

Perhaps you might think it is up to parents to keep such adult playthings out of reach of toddlers and ultra-foolish older children, but this is America — and this is the age of regulation and loose liability lawyering.

So of course they were banned, and the company that made them, Maxfield and Oberton, folded.

There is a long story behind the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s ban on Buckyballs. One could use it to limn the strange world of modern American product liability and business regulation. But it’s not the only story. As Ari Armstrong put it,

Now, not satisfied with destroying Maxfield and Oberton, the CPSC is seeking to destroy the company’s former CEO, Craig Zucker — who led a spirited although ultimately unsuccessful public campaign against the CPSC’s actions.

Zucker’s “Save Our Balls” campaign was, he said, a success, “but not successful enough to save the company.” Apparently it really ticked off folks at the CPSC, for the agency, against its own legal authorization, continues to prosecute Zucker personally.

Zucker fears this personal vendetta “is just the beginning.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.