My first book from 15 years ago was mostly about how things in our homes are broken by design. A series of punishing regulations through the years has broken so much.
The toilets don’t work because of water restrictions. For the lack of water flowing through, they are dirtier and stinkier and so are large cities. Also not working are showerheads and washing machines. Those are made worse by energy regulations. The same applies to dryers, toasters, refrigerators, and irons.
The lightbulb problem is a mess. For a while, they tried to get us to use fluorescents but they made our homes feel like hospitals. Finally, we have LEDs which are better but still lacking in the foundational warmth of good old-fashioned incandescents.
The gas cans don’t work, as I’m sure you have noticed. They come with crazy spouts that defy all engineering logic. You have to hack them up to get them to pour the way gas cans worked for a century.
Even the detergents are a mess and don’t clean clothing anymore, at least not the way they did for our grandparents. By regulatory force, they exclude phosphates that have been part of detergents for centuries
Now they are going after gas stoves.
When you put it all together, you have a tremendously downgraded quality of life. People don’t notice it because it has happened slowly but relentlessly for many decades.
A few years ago, I noticed that my lawnmower barely worked when the grass got high. The reason was due to the tiny space between the bottom of the mower and the ground surface. It would not allow air in to permit proper suction. Looking it up, I discovered the reason. It traces to safety regulations.
These regulations are strewn about dozens of agencies. Most of the rules were never passed by Congress except in the broadest terms. The implementation has been left to the agencies. They enforce them against manufacturers with terrible fines and penalties. Everyone has to comply and no one has known what to do about any of it.
All of this started getting on President Trump’s nerves some years ago. Particularly the water pressure rules and showerhead absurdities drove him mad. He made some inquiries only to find that the problem was imposed by government itself. He swore to do something about this in 2020 but ran out of time.
This has seriously affected the quality of life. As part of this, Trump has ended all subsidies for green energy and EVs, with the blessing of Elon Musk who thinks he can compete just fine in a free market, which indeed he can.
As part of this order, Trump endorsed: the “American people’s freedom to choose from a variety of goods and appliances, including but not limited to lightbulbs, dishwashers, washing machines, gas stoves, water heaters, toilets, and shower heads, and to promote market competition and innovation within the manufacturing and appliance industries.”
There it is! Finally. After a decade and a half of writing about this disaster, finally we have a president who has taken up the cause. He has called the whole basis of the restrictions and deprivations a hoax. He is wholly correct on this point. Few have dared to call into question this entire apparatus.
As a result, he has ordered every department to closely examine all their regulations that pertain to products and energy use and how those are affected by government rules. This is thrilling though I’m not sure we need any more study on this. Hopefully this will result in zeroing out thousands of regulations and departments that have been responsible for degrading the quality of life.
Note that this affects all sorts of products in addition to those requiring energy. Mentioning toilets and showerheads makes the point. It pertains to water only but these regulations are very similar to restrictions on energy use. They prioritize deprivation and austerity over living a good life.
Saving water, saving gas, and saving electricity is only a meritorious goal if it is currently being wasted for use on purposes that have nothing to do with the enrichment of human life. Saving alone is not the goal unless we are ready to return to the lives of hunter-gatherers or a time before internal combustion. Sad to say that many people have somehow fallen for this line of thinking; namely that civilization itself has corrupted us.
This kind of neo-Rousseauism or neo-Manicheism is incompatible with the Western idea of freedom, human choice, and property rights. In a free society, waste is determined by signals such as the price system. That is what allocates scarce resources among infinite consumption demands. We don’t rely on central planners because they are not smart enough to manage the whole of society, and constant impositions on our freedom to choose is not consistent with constitutional government.
Obviously Trump gets this, which is why this executive order is so important. In letter and spirit, it reverses about three-quarters of a century of terrible policy that has downgraded the quality of our lives. I’m doubtful that an edict alone is sufficient to reverse the trajectory but maybe it is. We shall see.
I look forward to incandescent light bulbs, toilets that don’t have to be flushed three times, washing machines that clean clothes, irons that shoot steam, and refrigerators that last longer than five years. All of this is possible so long as we prioritize freedom over regulation.
How Trump is going to prevail on these bureaucracies to shred millions of pages is another question. I cannot fathom how this is going to work. Maybe it will require some daring manufacturer to make a dishwasher that works, a toilet with a large tank, a showerhead that sprays, a gas can that pours well, and then see what happens.
I’m pretty confident that at this stage, such a daring entrepreneur would have the back of the Trump administration. Consumers would be overjoyed!
No question about it: the ambition to rejuvenate American manufacturing will require a shredding of the central plan that has long inhibited production and innovation. In the ambition, in any case, we seemed to have turned the corner. Now we wait for the reality to show itself.
