Why Getting Your Car Repaired Is Nearly Impossible
Commentary
The word “market” is usually associated with the stock market or perhaps a farmers’ market. This is a truncated view based only on what we see or hear reported in the financial press. The market in the real world is a vast collaborative effort involving exchange relationships all over the world, designed by no one in particular, to serve material needs and thus affects the whole of our lives.
For most of our lives we never imagined that the market could fundamentally fall apart. For decades, the complexity and reach of market forces have only grown, resulting in the biggest prosperity boom for the many in the history of the world. Everything has been there for us.
Some years ago, I asked one of the world’s best experts on economic freedom if the world’s system for material provision could ever really be shattered. He said no. It is too entrenched, too powerful, too all encompassing, too complex. No power in the world can overcome it, he opined.
Then one day, in the course of a few short weeks in 2020, he was proven wrong. We’ve learned that while the market is not designed by governments, much less administered by them, they can be destroyed by government. That’s exactly what they set out to do with totalitarian edicts to “shut down the economy” for a few weeks that lasted years.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men have yet to put Mr. Market back together again. You feel it in many aspects of your daily life. Employers can’t get decent employees. That’s not only because today’s workers lack skills and a work ethic. It’s also because more than 5 million people dropped out completely. The number of people not in the labor force vastly exceeds 2019. Half the people who left never came back.
Employees with high-end, no-show jobs are feeling very insecure. Rightly so. Service sector workers are overworked and underpaid especially given inflation.
Travelers face an amazing barrage of bad luck from suddenly canceled flights to shocking and hidden fees everywhere.
Goods and services routinely fluctuate wildly in price. Just a few months ago, eggs were nearly unaffordable. Now they are so cheap that stores have to limit the number of buyers.
And inflation continues to make a mess of everything. I was just in the Goodwill over the weekend and the prices were higher than the same goods retail tag from a few years ago (which I could tell because the original price tags were still on there). This place used to be considered a charity to help the workers but that was not at all obvious to me. This is now where the bourgeoisie shop and work.
Take a brief look at the insane market for cars.
May the gods favor you if your car breaks down. Even a punctured tire can create a debilitating problem of waiting weeks or even months for a replacement. Service on used cars is in extreme short supply. The service technicians are AWOL and supply chains are still a mess. Unless you are willing to use tape and bubble gum to keep it together, you could be without your own wheels for a long time.
According to the Wall Street Journal, citing a study by CCC Intelligent Solutions, “the average auto repair took more than 17 days to complete last year, up around 65 percent from 10.3 days in 2019.” That also means worse service than ever. The shop that used to finish most cars in a day or two now has a backlog of dozens.
The average age of a car on the road these days is 12.5 years, which is a record. This is partly because cars last much longer and drive more miles than they used to, which is a good thing. But it also means more repairs. And this reality is making the older cars much less useful. When you can get repairs done, they are wildly expensive.
Another reason there are so many older cars on the road is that the new ones were in extremely short supply for much of 2020 and 2021. When they did become available, they were unaffordable, and many rolled off the assembly line without modern features. This is because the chips used to run the features were not obtainable at any price.
The story of the chip problem is a drama of its own. American carmakers stopped ordering chips when the shutdowns hit, based on the decades-old practice of only holding in inventory what one needs right now. In late fall of 2020, they tried to start up again but the chipmakers had moved on to manufacturing for gaming consoles and home appliances.
Lacking new cars, buyers turned to used ones, which are extremely expensive due to parts shortages and a lack of service workers.
We aren’t Cuba yet but consider that case for a moment. The stoppage of progress after Castro’s communist revolution is most obvious in that the streets even today look like an antique car show. There are wonderful cars from the 1940s and 50s after which progress stopped. This is not just because of the embargo because the country stopped creating wealth.
But think of this. Those cars from the 1940s and 50s could be repaired by anyone with some acquired skill. You can improvise parts and substitute functionings. They were analogue cars. Today’s cars are digital and run by computers. They are kept in good repair thanks only to complex supply chains. When those breaks, these cars become tin cans.
Today’s world of cars in a Mad Max environment would not be souped-up gas guzzlers battling it out in the desert. It would be landfills filled with useless aluminum, many of which would be poisoned entirely by old batteries.
This is the absolute worst time for the Biden administration to be pressing everyone to adopt an electric vehicle. The federal government has given Ford, which is facing terrible times, a $9.2 billion loan to beef up its EV production. Government itself has become the major benefactor of the company as it tries to satisfy an extremely limited demand.
Experience so far suggests that electric cars will always be a niche market. It is a second car for urban residents who don’t have far to drive, which is to say that they are fine for the 15-minute cities that government wants to impose upon us. For everyone else, their pathetic range in winter and expense make them nothing but a degradation from gas-fueled cars.
They are no better and actually probably worse for the environment. Once government has managed to saturate the market enough with these things, it will be conveniently discovered that they too run on “fossil fuels” that endanger the environment. There will be another big national campaign for us all to bike everywhere.
One cannot help but notice that the exorable trend in policy today is to make America like Mao’s China, complete with universally issued androgynous clothing and a bicycle on every porch, with extreme controls on culture and consumption to purge every last reminder of the West from our minds.
The wild and destructive pretense that government could turn off the market like a light switch is the root cause of much of the chaos of our times. It is still with us and getting worse.
May this be a lesson of our times and all times. The market is delicate, complex, and so broad and deep that it surpasses human understanding. The planners only pretend to understand it and every attempt to control it creates chaos they cannot possibly anticipate.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
