Comment by objectivistbrit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by objectivistbrit | Hacker News Reader

objectivistbrit

People are focusing on the wrong question.

The question is not: what are the relative costs and benefits to user-repairable products? Of course there are both benefits and drawbacks.

The question is: who should decide?

That is, should the government enforce a "right to repair" - which means a ban on non-repairable products? Or should companies be able to manufacture both repairable and non-repairable products, and let consumers decide which they want to buy?

A free society is broader than just the free market. No companies manufacture a repairable version of X product? You can use free association to form the "Society for User-maintainable X Devices". You can use free speech to campaign in the press for user-maintainable X devices. You can promote to others the virtues of having a user-maintable X, until there's enough latent demand for startups to spring up to fill it.

None of this requires the government.

In a perfect world, consumers have perfect information and understand the subtleties of repairability and all of the unseen costs of disposable products. This is not a perfect world.

Government needs to step in because waste is a serious problem that affects everyone, not just the purchasing consumer (and, additionally, to compensate for the fact that consumer ignorance is unavoidable). Contribution to global warming by requiring the purchase of more appliances and devices, for example, is a classic negative externality. One of the core purposes of government is to correct for externalities (according to Adam Smith).

This law being sold as being pro-consumer. It is called "Right to Repair" and not "Right to Restrict Freedom of Choice to Help the Enviroment".

Please provide an argument on why this law will benefit consumers. The focus here is not on the environment.

It doesn't matter what they are selling it as. It's only important that it gets passed.

Electronics in general make use of a variety of "Rare Earth metals," that we are quickly running out of. At our current pace, we are set to run out of some of these Rare Earth metals in just a few decades. The United States is already 100% reliant on imports for many of them. Some sort of reduction scheme is necessary, otherwise the cost of all electronics will skyrocket in just a few years.

http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2012/09/19/rare-earth-metals-wi...

https://www.bu.edu/cas/magazine/spring16/elements-of-conflic...

You are completely theoretically correct.

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