Your Washing Machine Will Get Worse

Commentary

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, hot water heaters, showers, and freezers than we do. 

They used to last for decades. Now we are lucky if they last for 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 they 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 is not 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 bulbs that don’t run on smartphone apps is a challenge.

It’s been a gradual change but also impossible to deny.

Don’t blame the manufacturer, even if they don’t like to talk about it. There is one reason. It’s government regulations on energy use. They keep getting tighter and tighter year by year. We are supposed to use ever less energy and water and this means systematically degrading the machine while raising their price. 

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 should be used. Each year the answer is always less. This has been going on for decades, and it gets gradually worse each year. 

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 hearing 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 itself a stunner. The ethos in Washington has long been that the people must be squeezed, our conveniences wrecked, our lifestyle degraded, and our household functioning ruined by the bureaucracies in cooperation with the 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. I cannot confirm that. That said, the models available on the floor of big-box hardware stores are increasingly pathetic.

The regulators say that they are forcing technological improvements. This makes no sense. It’s like saying you are making a runner more quick by breaking his legs or putting nails on the track. All they are really doing is putting up barriers to improvements and basic functioning. 

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: it doesn’t work anymore. 

There is more going on here than simply shoddy products. This degradation of our appliances speaks to much bigger themes concerning the American spirit. People today do not entirely realize the wild optimism that captured this country after World War Two. 

Everything was flooding into homes, all these wonderful new time-saving machines that seemed to suggest that life could only get better. No more washing in tubs, scrubbing dishes, building fires, hanging up linens on clothelines, 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, that Americans had all these wonderful things, while the Soviet bloc seemed behind us, was a major point of national pride. They proved that capitalism worked, that our choice for freedom over government diktat was the right one. 

When Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev said at the U.N. that “We will bury you” he meant in terms of economic productivity. They truly believed that their centralized system was capable of making more and better products for consumers. Soviet Life magazine was devoted to showing this off, but this became increasingly implausible over time, as the American system of free enterprise kept outperforming everywhere else in the world. 

The key to illustrating this was our cars and the wonderful machines that had taken over our homes. Our domestic life was a point of great pride, featured in so many television shows from the 1950s through the 1980s. We were treated to pictures of domestic bliss thanks in large part to the wonderful conveniences to which every American household had access. 

Our appliances were central to this period of progress. In 1987, however, Ronald Reagan (who by that time had lost some of the 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 started dismantling the progress of the past. It was our toilets, then shower heads, then washing machines and dishwashers, then toasters and refrigerators, and then the decivilization movement hit light bulbs and everything else electrical or mechanical 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 Trump at the end of his term, started swearing that he was going to do something to fix the problem. It would have been a welcome message at any time in his term 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 didn’t go anywhere.

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 whole claim has lost resonance, however, especially given the wild overreach with the attempt of virus control. How many crazy ambitions can government have that only end in spreading more misery to the American population? 

What can change the trajectory? We need the regulators out of our homes, permanently. Manufacturers have to be free again to make nice products for us and we should be free to buy them. That goes for shower heads, toilets, and hot water heaters, in addition to dryers and washers and more. We need to be completely done with 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 controversial now 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 stop this and dramatically reverse this trajectory, a grave reckoning is coming. We could end up reversing all the mechanical progress of the last century, and doing it by force. This is no longer an exaggeration. We can walk around in VR headsets but apps and digital doodads do not wash our clothing and 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.