As the world’s new(ish) digital age has introduced more complex ways to do business and create products, a weird phenomenon has taken place. It used to be that when you bought something, it was yours, to do what you wanted with it. When it broke, you could get it fixed or fix it yourself, and in that process it was never a question about whether you owned the whole thing. For many products, from agricultural machinery to cell phones, it’s been a fight just to get back to the way things were.
I stand proudly for the Right to Repair. This article will focus mainly on what that means for farmers and ranchers, but just know that I stand for it in other products, from phones to laptops to cars and whatever else. You bought it, you should be able to get it fixed without submitting to ridiculous or restrictive conditions to do so.
Just recently, we’ve seen progress in the Right to Repair movement. Agriculture giant John Deere agreed to allow farmers and repair shops access to manuals and other resources that let them fix their own stuff. Even so, I believe our family farmers and ranchers deserve more than a temporary allowance to repair their equipment.
What Right to Repair means is a return to the default state of things. You buy something, you own it, and you can get it fixed if and when you need it. Look at cars, for example. You’re absolutely free to pop the hood when something goes wrong, and if you have the know-how, you can fix it. If the repair goes beyond what you can do with your hands and tools, you take it to the shop. I know I’ve spent my fair share of time both looking under the hood and sitting in auto-repair shop lobbies.
Even with Right to Repair, companies are still free to offer special repair services under warranty. Warranties exist for a specific reason: to provide value to customers by vowing to repair or fix equipment. It should be up to the customer to use the warranty or to decide to go a different direction. Sometimes making use of the warranty is a great way to save some money, and sometimes it isn’t.
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We’ll often hear the arguments that independent repairs can “harm the brand” if they go awry. That’s not exactly wrong, but it overstates a problem that exists mainly at the individual level. Using the car example, I usually research which repair shop I’ll use, because I want a mechanic who knows what they’re doing. I reckon we can safely trust independent consumers to make those sorts of judgments for themselves. We can reliably expect someone doing sketchy repairs to do a sketchy job, and we don’t usually blame the original manufacturer for it.
What about environmental concerns? There is a lot of regulation about emissions compliance for agricultural machinery, and manufacturers are expected to ensure those regulations are met as their products are used by individuals. Once again, we see the same parallel with automotive repairs! If someone removes a catalytic converter, they are to blame for it. Prosecuting people for fleecing environmental protections is already something we do, even for products without Right to Repair.
In Right to Repair’s worst-case scenarios, individuals would be held liable for illegal modifications. Individuals are accountable for their own decisions, and companies get to maintain their brand integrity by offering the best quality of service possible, because it’s their product. All it does is open up the field for other options regular folks can use.
Right to Repair is about expanding liberty for regular folks. Liberty in the economy is what we call “competition,” and the rule of thumb goes that more competition is better for consumers. We value liberty in our political lives, and we value competition in our economic lives as well.
Why forgo healthy competition because of a few edge case examples? When edge cases affect policy, we don’t just abandon the whole policy, we build around them.
Our politics these days has career politicians telling us “no” just because a problem is hard to fix. They want us to change our behavior around what works best for them. As South Dakota’s Independent Senator, I’d say “that’s a tough problem, I’d better get started working on it.”
Thank you for reading.
Brian L. Bengs, Lt Col (Ret)
Independent Candidate for U.S. Senate
Folks, we’ve got another crucial fundraising deadline in just two weeks. We need a strong show of force that tells the nation that we’re ready to win here in South Dakota. Recent polling shows that this could be the closest U.S. Senate race South Dakota has seen in two decades. I need your help to make that happen.
If 30 folks can pitch in $50, it’ll go a long way to securing our momentum. Together, we can do this.
Minnesota AG Keith Ellison, a Democrat, is SUING John Deere for the Right to Repair on behalf of America’s farmers!!! NO Republican is doing that! I attended a meeting of and for farmers in Minnesota where he explained what he and his office are doing working FOR the farmers of America!! NOT one Republican of Minnesota (Michelle Fischbach, Tom Emmer, Pete Stauber, Brad Finstad) are doing it! Neither are Republicans John Thune, Dusty Johnson, or Mike Rounds!!! They would rather do the Trump/Republican farmer shuffle - blow up the markets of farmers and then use Taxpayer and Farmer’s Money on bailouts and handouts because of the mess they created.
It’s an interesting problem. How would taking something to a repair shop, or repairing it yourself, “harm the brand?” It doesn’t actually make any sense. The likelier explanation is that the item was so poorly made that the manufacturer wouldn’t want the customer to know why the item needed repair. My concern is that depriving the manufacturer’s representative, or dealership, from doing the repair will lead them to plan earlier obsolescence.