Member-only story
Monopolists are winning the repair wars
Again.
In 2018, dozens of states introduced Right to Repair bills. These bills are wildly popular among voters, but wildly unpopular among monopolists ranging from Apple to Microsoft to Google to GM to John Deere to Wahl. Every one of these bills was defeated.
Repair advocates regrouped for 2021. 27 R2R bills have been introduced at the state level. Every single one that came up for a vote was defeated, thanks to aggressive lobbying by an unholy alliance of the country’s largest, most profitable, least taxpaying corporations.
In 2014, a pair of American political scientists published a groundbreaking peer-reviewed paper analyzing 30 years’ worth of US policy-making that compared policy outcomes to public polling results.
They concluded that general public sentiment had almost no impact on US policy making — but the political preferences of wealthy people and large corporations were hugely predictive of what laws and regulations we’d get.
Or, in poli-sci jargon, “Economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.”
The Right to Repair fight is a hell of a proof of this principle. It’s really hard to overstate the popularity of the idea that you should be able to fix your own stuff, or choose where you get your stuff fixed.
Take auto-repair. As auto-manufacturing has grown more concentrated, car makers have squeezed independent mechanics — as close to a folk-hero as the American imagination can produce! — to the margins.
After all, forcing car owners to use official service depots has huge advantages: Manufacturers can gouge on service prices, they can force drivers to buy expensive original parts, and they get to unilaterally decide when a car is beyond repair and force you to buy a new one.
