Ford and Firestone aren't retailers, they're manufacturers, and they were held responsible for their own mistakes, not the mistakes of third parties.

There is no reasonable way for online retailers to evaluate product safety of millions of small batch third party products. Either they sell them without evaluating them or they don't sell them. Imposing liability on them is exactly how you get them to not sell them, but then we can't have Etsy or eBay.

> This is not the first time in history that a plague of imported items causes a problem.

It seems like the first time the problem has happened in this particular way. Historically importing was a large-scale operation done in bulk with homogeneous products, so the importer knew what they were doing and had deep pockets. Today you can cost-effectively get a 99 cent piece of electronics shipped directly from a one-person shop in China. Either you shut down the entire idea of that, and then things are going to cost a lot more than they do now, or we need a different approach.