Thanks a lot, Michel. As always, after I published the paper I thought of material I wished I’d included in it. Particularly the recent CPSIA legislation, which will effectively destroy small apparel manufacturers by mandating a $4000 safety test for each separate product line marketed. As Eric Husman described it at GrimReader, the small apparel business model involves designing a whole lot of different product lines, seeing which ones sell, and switching production to those lines on a demand-pull basis. The testing requirements essentially criminalize this model, so that the only companies that can absorb the cost are those that intend to switch to large-batch mass production in the lines that sell.
In almost every case, the state intervenes to impose minimum overhead costs and prevent small-scale production using spare cycles of capital equipment people own anyway. Since high overhead is mandated, you can only enter the field on an all-or-nothing basis.
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