Our friends on the left have come up with yet a new right. You had better be sitting down when you read this, or you’ll keel right over. What is this new right? It is the right to repair. Bernie Sanders has had no role whatsoever in uncovering this new right; however, he cannot but be happy with this discovery.
What is going on here?
When your car or pickup truck no longer works sufficiently, you bring it back to any repair shop, or to the dealer, or to your brother-in-law who is handy. If your vehicle is not under its own steam, then you get it towed there. They fix it, you pick it up, that’s the end of the story.
Not so for farm tractors and combines. Those beasties are so big and so slow, it is far easier to either fix them yourself if you are a handyman farmer, or to get the repairman to make a visit out to your acreage. Mohammad doesn’t go to the mountain; in this case, the mountain travels to Mohammad.
So far so good. Economic rationality is observed. It is far cheaper this way, and just as effective (the mechanic’s truck contains all the tools he needs; good agriculturalists are part time handymen).
Where, then, is the worm in the apple? Modern farm equipment is so highly technical (the inside of one of these babies looks like the Starship Enterprise flight deck), with digital features galore, software all over the place, that these previously workable arrangements no longer suffice. So what you might say. Instead of a mechanical engineer, send out a computer nerd to the farm; he’ll soon put matters to rights. The problem is that modern tractor-trailer combine manufacturers keep their software close to their chests. If you want to get your gear back in operational order, the dealer is the only game in town.
Ordinarily, old equipment loses value. But the fact of the matter is that the typical farmer can do maintenance on decade-old tractors himself, or hire a relatively cheap local technician to do so. As a result low tech John Deere tractors have risen in price tenfold between 1989 and 2019.
This economic anomaly has given rise to the “Right to Repair” movement. The U.S. Public Interest Research Group has launched an effort to compel manufacturers to part with the technology such that any halfway competent person can do the job.
In economic terminology, the manufacturers are insisting on “bundling”: selling the equipment and the ability to repair together, not separately, as many farmers wish. Why do they do so? Presumably, they operate on the basis that the modern product is so highly technical that only they can be entrusted with repair. In economic-speak, they are paternalistically maintaining that efficiency can best be attained in this manner. If they are correct in this assessment, producers of farm equipment who “unbundle” will not be able to outcompete them. If they are wrong, this is precisely the market outcome. In neither case is it justified to compel manufacturers to adopt a different marketing policy.
In the free society, there are no such things as positive “rights.” There is no “right” to food, or clothing or shelter; these are all thinly disguised demands for other people’s wealth. Nor is there any “right to repair”; this merely masks a desire to order other people around. There are only negative rights: the right not to be murdered, raped, stolen from, compelled to unbundle commercial offerings.
