Here’s something my haircutter said to me last week that everyone knows but is hardly talked about in polite company.
Our appliances don’t work nearly as well as they once did. Our grandparents had better washing machines, refrigerators, dishwashers, garbage disposals, clothes dryers, water heaters, showers, and freezers than we do.
Appliances used to last for decades. Now, we are lucky if they last a few years. A quick check on X and other forums confirms it; the experiences we have today with appliances are truly awful.
Repair is nearly impossible because no one knows how to do it. And if the appliances work at all, they do not work well. In our own homes, we bump from machine to machine with great frustration.
The dishwasher runs for hours, and the glasses still come out spotty. Our clothing doesn’t get clean. Our showers don’t work. Our toilets are forever being plunged and the insides replaced. The dryer doesn’t dry. The icemaker is forever breaking. It’s really everything in our homes. Even finding light bulbs that aren’t operated by smartphone apps is a challenge.
It’s been a gradual change, but it’s impossible to deny.
Don’t blame the manufacturer. There is one reason for this change: government regulations on energy use. They keep getting tighter and tighter year by year. We are supposed to use less energy and water, which means the machine is systematically degraded while its price rises.
It’s a strange kind of central plan being imposed on us. The Department of Energy possesses extensive plans on how every appliance should be made and how much water and energy each should use. Each year, it’s always less. This has been going on for decades, and it’s gradually getting worse.
Congress doesn’t approve these changes. They are edicts from unaccountable bureaucracies. The violators of our freedom are nameless.
Last year, the head of the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers told a congressional panel the following: “The reality of the laws of physics that require some amount of energy and water for home appliances to keep food cold and to clean and dry clothes and dishes has to be recognized.”
No kidding! That this would need to be said at all is wildly shocking. And yet this announcement of basic reality was a stunner. The ethos in Washington has long been that the people must be squeezed, our conveniences wrecked, our lifestyle degraded, and our household functionality ruined by bureaucracies in cooperation with manufacturers. There is simply no questioning of that basic postulate.
New standards are going into effect later this year. They are guaranteed to make everything in your household worse. So perhaps now is the time to buy, if you can afford it. My rich friends say there are workarounds by spending enough money or buying things abroad, which I cannot confirm. That said, the models available on the floor of big-box hardware stores are increasingly pathetic.
The regulators say they are forcing technological improvements. This makes no sense. It’s like saying you are making a runner faster by breaking his legs or putting nails on the track. All they are really doing is putting up barriers to improvements and basic functionality.
If there are improvements to be had, the manufacturers will find them and advertise them. They don’t need to be forced to do anything. Even in terms of energy use, consumers believed for a while that this or that model would really save on bills. But over time, people have figured it out. They now realize that energy efficiency simply means this or that doesn’t work anymore.
There is more going on here than simply shoddy products. This degradation of our appliances speaks to much larger themes concerning the American spirit. People today do not entirely realize the wild optimism that captured this country after World War II.
Flooding into homes were all these wonderful new time-saving machines that seemed to suggest life could only get better. No more washing in tubs, scrubbing dishes, building fires, hanging up linens on clotheslines, and so on. Now, we had machines to do all that for us, and we could, in exchange, read books, fuss over the kids, and build community.
In the middle of the Cold War, the fact that Americans had all these wonderful things, while the concerns about the Soviet bloc seemed behind us, was a major point of national pride. It proved that capitalism worked, that our choice of freedom over government diktat was the right one.
When Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev said at the U.N., “We will bury you,” he meant in terms of economic productivity. He asserted that the Soviet centralized system was capable of making more and better products for consumers. “Soviet Life” magazine was devoted to pushing this message, but it became increasingly implausible over time because the American system of free enterprise kept outperforming every other system in the world.
Illustrating this were our cars and the wonderful machines that had taken over our homes. Our domestic life was a point of great pride and featured in many television shows from the 1950s through the 1980s. We were treated to images of domestic bliss, thanks in large part to the conveniences to which every American household had access.
Our appliances were central to this period of progress. In 1987, however, President Ronald Reagan (who by that time had lost some of his passion for the job) signed the National Appliance Energy Conservation Act. It seemed innocuous, like another path to guaranteeing progress. No one at that point knew what was coming.
Once the regulators got in charge, they began dismantling the progress of the past. It was our toilets, then shower heads, then washing machines and dishwashers, then toasters and refrigerators. Then the decivilization movement hit light bulbs and every other electrical or mechanical device in our homes. Today, the average apartment or home is not nearly as well-functioning as it once was.
What is the attitude on Capitol Hill? Some lawmakers are fed up. And to be fair, President Donald Trump at the end of his term started swearing that he was going to address the problem. It would have been a welcome message at any time during his presidency except that while he was saying this, millions of businesses were suffering from lockdowns, and the country had already been brutalized by the bureaucratic marauding in the name of virus controls. So it went nowhere.
As soon as Joe Biden took office, the effort to take apart our appliances began again, this time in the name of stopping climate change. The entire claim has lost resonance, however, especially given the wild overreach in the name of virus control. How many crazy ambitions can the government pursue that end only in spreading more misery to the American populace?
What can change the trajectory? We need the regulators out of our homes, permanently. Manufacturers have to be free to make good products for us that we can freely buy. That goes for shower heads, toilets, and water heaters, in addition to dryers and washers and more. We need to be completely free of these cockamamie “solutions” that purport to do the same job while using little to no energy.
What actually is the point of energy? It is to serve the human population. What does this mean? It means granting everyone a better way of life. That such claims are now controversial tells you all you need to know about where we are headed with the regulatory beast that has seized control of American manufacturing.
If we do not dramatically reverse this trajectory, a grave reckoning is coming. We could end up reversing, by force, all the mechanical progress of the last century. This is no longer an exaggeration. We can walk around in virtual-reality headsets, but apps and digital doodads do not wash our clothes or dishes or get our bodies clean. The digital world is fun, but it doesn’t amount to anything if the physical world all around us is collapsing.
