The Repair Subsidy Trap: Fixing Toasters or Funding Greed?
London is currently flirting with a "Right to Repair" scheme that sounds like a green dream: 50% off your electrical repairs, funded by the taxpayer. The goal is to stop us from tossing out slightly wonky kettles and to save the planet from electronic waste. It’s the kind of "circular economy" rhetoric that makes bureaucrats feel warm and fuzzy. But as any student of human nature—or basic economics—knows, the road to hell is paved with good intentions and government vouchers.
History is littered with the corpses of subsidy programs that backfired. When you inject "free" money into a specific niche, you aren't helping the consumer; you’re ringing the dinner bell for the merchants. As Milton Friedman famously noted, the most efficient way to spend money is when you spend your own money on yourself. You care about both the cost and the quality. But when the government steps in to pay half the bill, the repair shop has every incentive to inflate their base price. If a repair used to cost £40, and the government offers a £50 subsidy, suddenly that repair costs £90. The customer pays the same, the shop gets a windfall, and the taxpayer gets fleeced.
This is the dark side of the "nanny state" business model. It assumes citizens are too dim-witted to value their own belongings unless a politician dangles a coupon. In reality, the reason we don't repair things is that manufacturers—the ultimate high-tech primates—design products with "planned obsolescence." They make devices impossible to open without proprietary tools. A subsidy doesn't fix a broken design philosophy; it just creates a parasitic layer of middlemen who learn to harvest government funds. If the GLA really wanted to help, they’d get out of the way and let the market punish manufacturers of unfixable junk, rather than trying to bribe us into fixing what was designed to fail.
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