Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by croes 17 days ago
Foreign made medical gloves have the same compliance to fulfill
1 comments

They really, really don’t. I’m sympathetic to the goal of moving manufacturing stateside, but fixing regulatory hurdles needs to happen first.

Just because a foreign glove manufacturer has to comply with the same safety/quality standards for their product only scratches the surface. Domestic companies also have to operate compliant with regulations regarding hiring, real estate, safety, finance, and many more.

To be clear, a lot of those regulations (most of them!) achieve good things and should be preserved! Working/environmental/low-corruption conditions in the US (though they could be better) are often superior to those same conditions in the places we import from precisely because of those regulations. But not all regulations (even those with good goals) are effective, others are not worth the burden, and all of them in aggregate do directly contribute to domestic manufacturing loss. It’s a hard problem that others (e.g. Pahlka) have written about much more wisely than I can.

Regulations exist for a reason. Polluting industries like the plastics business would obviously prefer not to be burdened by them. I am not particularly sympathetic to their concerns.