Planned Obsolescence

Planned obsolescence is evil. It robs the greater part of the people of their things by consciously designing those things so they break well before the end of their useful life. And it is robbery. Theft. Its incredibly sad that people now expect their things to constantly break.

The perfected form of planned obsolescence would be to have everything break as soon as it was taken out of the box, so that you were forced to turn right around an go buy another one, which itself would promptly break, and so on, until you run completely out of both money and debt, reducing you to abject poverty while making the rich even richer.

I’m sure someone will go, “But that’s capitalism for you!”, and my response is no, this is precisely not capitalism. The basics of capitalism is that people obtain capital (stuff) that they can then used to produce more capital (stuff). In every economic system conceivable, you end up with more capital (stuff) if that capital (stuff) isn’t constantly breaking on you and needing to be replaced.

So why do people design things to break? I can think of a couple likely answers: the broken window fallacy and mandated profit growth.

The broken window fallacy has been covered and debunked by libertarian thinkers since at least 1850. It’s the idea that breaking things to force them to be replaced stimulates economic activity. This hypothesis is behind such boondoggles as the “Cash for Clunkers” programs.

Going along with Bastiat’s idea of literal windows, consider two timelines that have the exact same number of windows made, but in one you have someone with a hammer go around and break half the windows. In which timeline are the people wealthier (have more stuff)? Obviously the one without the serial window breaker.

Planned obsolescence removes the need to have someone go around with a hammer by making the window low enough quality that it breaks itself. Products are designed to deliberately fail much earlier that a properly built item would. Anything you see yourself constantly having to replace (cell phones, computers, clothes, cars, TVs, etc.) have fallen victim to planned obsolescence.

The other thing is because of mandated profit growth. Central banks have a big hand in this thru inflating currency supplies, stealing purchasing power from the mass of the people thru the printing press or digital entry. You also have “public” companies that are mandated by law to produce the largest returns for their shareholders as possible. One of the easiest ways to increase profits is make the company’s products break as soon as they can get away with.

It is here that people get the mistaken belief that planned obsolescence is a feature of capitalism. The same people are mistaken that our economic system is capitalism instead of the corporatist (or socialist, fascist, etc.) system we have where the ultra-rich own both the corporations and the politicians and dictate policy regardless of who they allow to be the face of government.

As a side-note, this is why the Powers That Be absolutely detest Trump: because they don’t own him outright in addition to being a populist. By the way, classical democracy is literally populism. Anyone who says that populism is a thread to democracy has redefined the word “democracy” to mean its exact opposite.

How do you get out of the feedback loop where something important breaks, you have to spend your limited money to buy a replacement where the less pricey one is designed to break and you are unable to afford the expensive one that is designed to break after a bit more time?

I don’t have a complete answer.

But I have a guess. Make things yourself whenever you can, and where you can’t, have someone you know personally make it for you. If you are building an object, and you have the skill to do so, you can over-engineer it so that it lasts longer and so that when it does eventually break, it can be repaired instead of being disposed of.