Thoughts on Planned Obsolescence - Part One

[bertsmobile1]

Market-based is the worst economic system for delivering quality goods for a reasonable price--except for all the rest. No single person, or small group of people, can do a better job of creating an economy.

You can buy a good mower if you wish. It may not be at the price you want to pay.

You can buy a mower for a low price. It will not be the mower you wish it to be.

Not all mowers are cheap pieces of junk; good mowers are not affordable to all people.

Somewhere in the middle is where most deals are struck--you buy what you can afford. If that's the $99 Big Box Special, you buy it and hope it lasts long enough for better times to come so you can afford something better. If it's a $10K+ Skag to mow your 1-acre lot, that's your decision, too. But it's nice to have choices instead of having government intervene and create a workers' paradise where the store shelves contain nothing at all.

Yes there is no arguement about the economic benefits of a market based economy. WHEN IT IS WORKING PROPERLY & NOT BEING MANIPULATED BY MAJOR PLAYERS
But what is missing is the INFORMED market because those in a position of CONTROL refuse to INFORM the market.
The only sector of industry where the rules are enforced is the stock market where companies who fail to inform the market get fined or kicked out.
And why are the rules enforced in the stockmarket and nowhere else, because that is where then mega rich make their money and the mega rich make the rules and force the government to enforce them.
Walk into a big box store & ask an assistant how long should I get out of this ( anything ) and see what answer you get.
The other problem is the free competative market philosophy assumes a plethoria of suppliers with a roughly equal share of the market.
That situation has not existed from day 3 because on day 2 the manufacturers all joined together in an effort to control the market, finally leading to the anti trust laws of the 20's which morphed to the anti monopoly laws of the 70's.
Then the retailers all joined together on day 3 to counter the power of the manufacturers trusts .
The odd one out and total loosers are the end users because we are not in a position to form a buyers alliance and almost every attempt to do form was disbanded by government intervention.

When any manufacturer , wholesaler or retailer gets to a position where they are more than twice the size of the rest of then the system breaks down because you no longer have groups competing on an equal footing.
Look at what Microsoft has done to computing. That has cost the average home computer user $ 10,000 more that they should have paid since 1990.
In business it has run into the trillions because of the dominance of Windows ( which was stolen in the first place ) and the pernicious coding so you had to use Microsoft applications because Windows prevented any 3rd party softwear working properly.

Australia is a good example of a system of controlled capitalism that worked very well till the 80's when the Hawke government instituted "economic reform" that has effectively killed off all of the local manufacturing and cost the public dearly.
We used to have quotas on imports then massive import duty on over quota imports.
Thus we only got top shelf lawnmowers imported so the importers could maximise their profits.
Thus we good good quality highly durable mowers, many of which I still use and will be passed on.
This is a good use of world's resources because we did not consume lots of iron ore coal lime & energy to make landfill .
Also it made the local factories produce either top shelf products to compete with the imports or trash for the impoveraged .
Hence the Victa rotary mower with swing back blades ,under deck exhaust blade disc, air snorkel with unsnagable control wires running through the snorkel.

After deregulation larger retailers went to the USA and bought all of the crap mowers that failed in the market place over there at the end of the season at a knock down price.
because of the massive differences in the market sizes this allowed the retailers to flood the local market with very cheap trash mowers that sent the 4 smaller mower makers to the wall.
The larger makers stopped developing new & improved models and concentrated on making the existing ones cheaper to the point that now I could not in all honestly recommend any mower apart from most of the Honda's.

In the 70's & 80's I was a practicing metallurgist and as part of that attended hundreds of conferences and noticed a massive change in attitude where innovation & improvement got totally dumped in favour of domination & cheapness.
CONTROL the MARKET was the mantra of the 80's & 90's and that was the end of a free market .
Dairy was regulated till around 2000 and like all regulated farming was very corrupt with farm production quotas were given to the "right" farms so we deregulated on a whim of the right wing government of the day.
The net result ?
The duopoly retailers desimated the industry by selling milk at less than the actual cost of production, milk processors went to the wall , hundreds for farmers drove out to the bottom paddock the blew their heads off with shot guns and Australia went from a net exporter of dairy to an importer of dairy so while many like to hold up the communist "empty shelf supermarket" myth as the example of why capitalism is great , it is not the case .
People are greedy and the more powerful they are the greedier they become thus they will always find a way to subvert the market controls for their own personal greedy gains thus all markets need some sort of regulations.