90% of these "solutions" are that the government will save the day with decisions that benefit its citizens and it's own bottom line. That doesn't represent reality and I don't see how you could get there from here.
Why?
Because they can't even solve the classic problems in front of them. Primarily healthcare. Healthcare is a thing that affects everyone. It's a problem as old as time. And it's vital to life. If the government can't get this right, what chance is there that we can trust them to regulate something like right to repair.
With a sufficiently high premium for new products, consumers will automatically start prioritizing device longevity and/or repairability when making their purchasing decisions.
Solving the supply/demand/patent/changing demographics/liability issues of healthcare seem far more complicated.
A flat tax does not make sense to me. It would have the least effect on the most expensive items, which is what you want to be most repairable. The more expensive the product, the more repairable it should be.
https://thisdayinwinehistory.com/the-effects-of-british-tari...
For a product you can use over and over and/or repair, a percentage tax would make it so buying the low quality version 5 times is more expensive than buying the high quality version 1 time.
For example, right now I buy a pair of shoes every 6 months or so from Costco for $25/$30.
With a 100% excise tax, these shoes would cost me $100 or more, and a higher quality pair of $100 shoes that lasts 2 years would interest me instead.
I write all of this while wearing ten-year-old boots which have been re-soled twice.
It’s a simple solution if you only care about device longevity and nothing else. You’re basically proposing that we vote to make new iPhones 50% more expensive.
Um no, I don’t think I’ll be voting on that. Good luck getting support for your bill.
I also do alot (in my opinion) to improve the world in my corner. It's not possible for 1 person to fix healthcare AND climate change AND education AND homelessness, etc.
I never claimed I could. In fact I never claimed I could fix even one one of those things.
(In my country, it is illegal to be uninsured. The flip side of this is that it is therefore illegal for an insurance company to refuse coverage. Another corollary is that insurance is personal, without employers as unneeded middlemen.)
There's an edge case where if you have the "state" insurance, then leave the country, have private health care abroad, and then move back, the health insurance situation gets difficult. You're no longer allowed to get the "state" health insurance, and must go private. But the private ones can basically rack you for the maximum amount if you're old enough, so you can end up not being able to afford the insurance. At that point, you're now breaking the law, as I understood it, because you're without health care insurance in a country that mandates it by law.
Please note that I didn't say Universal health care. I'm a consumer of healthcare and so I'm qualified to judge it as a problem, but I'm not going to prescribe the optimal path - I leave that to the real experts.
I'll also say Universal Health Care =/= health care solved. I've spoken to plenty of people across UK/Canada/EU who have a lot of complaints about their system.
I think that it's not logically coherent to say that government is worthless just because it hasn't managed to resolve your favorite issue yet.
Don't get me wrong -- the government is no panacea, and sometimes it can even make a problem worse. But it is a powerful force that can and does address and resolve real issues.
Healthcare is not my favorite issue. It’s a fundamental human issue. That’s why I selected it.
In comparison, right to repair is a niche “favorite issue”.
One of these things is trillions of dollars in the national budget, the other, barely any one even thinks about.
Why do I want lawmakers to bike shed on right to repair while healthcare is unsolved?
I don't think government is bikeshedding on right to repair, either. The amount of time and effort being put into that issue is a tiny fraction of the amount of time and effort being put into health care issues.
What do you even expect them to do? Enrich themselves? Make government even more dysfunctional to prove your point?
I don't know about you, but even if I believed governments are evil and dysfunctional I'd rather vote someone idealistic in who doesn't believe that and tries to really fix things. Unless of course you want the whole system to go down.
This attitude is poisonous. It's not constructive.
Edit: It's not constructive to dismiss government out of hand with vague hand-wavy arguments. Government may or may not be the solution. If you don't think it's the solution, you should be able to produce concrete arguments to support your thinking.
Possibly the ultimate poison and deconstruction? We would be better off unlearning so many things we think we know.
But it’s the meat suits in charge of government that are the problem. We hide behind reductive euphemisms.
The problem is Nancy Pelosi, Trump, Biden, Mitch McConnell, Schumer, Feinstein, Grassley, RBG… the problem is leaving the same old ossified assholes in charge.
Electrical turnovers have flushed corruption and improved economic gains for public: https://www.nber.org/papers/w29766
Stop voting for post world war, Cold War paranoids, who huffed leaded gas fumes prior to the ban. Ageist? Who cares! Look their implicit ageism deflating the next generation, doing nothing but ignoring global warming.
The problem is not nebulous social terms like “government” or “capitalism”. It’s the fucking nutjobs in power.
Everyone wants to take the Leave it to Beaver approach to our elders. The result is nihilistic indifference to the future as we wax poetic about the problem. It’s bizarre and pathetic how we continue to debate the issue in vacuous abstraction