From the “You Can’t Make this Stuff Up” Department…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… comes this report, from May 2017, on a European Parliament resolution that is impossible to spoof because it is a spoof on itself. (My son, Thomas – erupting in laughter – just found this report and shared it with me.) The report’s title is “EU aims to abolish planned obsolescence.”

Damn all this rapid, incessant improvement in the likes of personal computers and cellular devices! Wouldn’t life be better if we all still used the perfectly functional devices pictured here rather than wasting our money, as we do in 2018, buying pads and smartphones? Politicians in Europe want the optimal rate of progress in technology to be set by the all-knowing and benevolent state rather than by all those unreliable choices made by consumers spending their own money as they deem best and entrepreneurs risking their own funds. What could go wrong? (Nota bene: Overwhelmingly, the people who push for and applaud resolutions such as this one by the European Parliament are in America called “Progressives.” Bizarre, that.)

…..

Here’s my favorite sentence from the report:

The European Parliament also hopes the resolution will also stimulate job creation, because it should result in more independent repair services.

Yep! Nothing enriches the masses like arranging for all of them to be stuck with out-of-date technologies and for some of them to be employed repairing out-of-date devices.

…..

There’s no doubt that individuals acting privately – in families, in friendships, in free markets – often say and do childish, stupid, and sometimes even destructive things. But there’s also no doubt that the forum that brings out, magnifies, and amplifies  – and, unlike in private settings, actively encourages – human childishness, stupidity, and destructiveness is politics. Compared to any randomly chosen government official, the typical consumer, worker, business executive, entrepreneur, and investor is more logical than Mr. Spock, more sober than a devout Morman, more intelligent than Einstein, more wise that King Solomon, more creative than Edison, and more resolute than Helen Keller.