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Comment by msrenee | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure how I'm supposed to have any kind of sympathy for a manufacturer who wants to offer a worse product for more money. Especially when that directly translates to higher food costs for everyone.

I'm not saying communism is the answer, but a free market where your choices are a crappy "cheap" product or an acceptable product for twice the price isn't something to be proud of. Oh, the market will solve the problem. Well this is what the market has produced, so that means this is the best possible option. It's like some kind of religion. If this is what the market has decided, then it must be the best thing and we have no right to question it.

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By the option that suits people the most, I didn't mean "best".

The free market is actually a science, and the "invisible hand of the market" is formalized by game theory. And it often result in optimal solutions, but not always. The prisoner's dilemma is the best-known counter-example. There is mathematical proof that a free market is not perfect, but currently, in practice and when supplemented by relatively light regulation, that's the best we have.

As for the choice, you can't have good and cheap, it is not about being proud of something, it is just how things are. Legislation can just remove the choice. For example, you are not allowed to buy a car so cheap that it is going to kill you and the environment, which is a good thing. But because of that, you are forced to pay "twice the price", you just don't notice it because the cheap option is simply not available.

Your example was a $50k tractor that you couldn't work on or a $100k tractor you could fix yourself. To me that means that by buying the $100k tractor, you're giving them an extra $50k to make up for the money they would otherwise make off repairs. It's whether it's reasonable for a company to sell you a product and then expect any loss in profits to be made up at a later date with maintenance. Almost like a loss leader.

You continue to argue that because this is what the market has come up with, there is no better way to do it. You can absolutely, as suggested in the article, make it illegal to make it either illegal to do your own repairs or impossible without purchasing certain software or licenses. But because the market hasn't decided that and it's a form of regulation, then it must not be a good solution. I'm sure there are plenty of unintended consequences to legislation like this, but the consequence of no regulation is a situation where you can't repair your own equipment and the dealership can charge however much they want for the repairs, as you have no recourse.

> I'm not sure how I'm supposed to have any kind of sympathy for a manufacturer who wants to offer a worse product for more money.

Apple.

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