Right to repair wouldn't be a pigouvian tax. There are no negative externalities to selling a product that is unrepairable — no one but the buyer gets harmed by it — it's just that people buy products before sufficiently informing themselves about what to do when they break.
Instead, a pigouvian tax would be on something like, say, me offering you to punch an uninvolved third-party that you don't like in exchange for money. I may be happy because I made money, and you may be happy because you wanted to see someone punch said third-party, but overall it would still be negative sum because the third-party would obviously not be happier. So one way to fix that is by taxing it. (A less extreme example is environmental pollution.)
Taxing unrepairable products would be much more like taxing addictive drugs that pose no danger to other people, where the legislation protects people from their own bad decisions.
> people buy products before sufficiently informing themselves
I think you are implying that we should socialise losses - informing ourselves is not free. We don't want to become specialists in understanding paperwork. Expecting individuals to invest time to learn how to make the perfect consumer decision is just unworkable. Making complex tradeoffs between conflicting requirements is an expensive and time-consuming process.
A11y: informing ourselves is not accessible. Not everyone is an engineer/economist type that is good at making complex tradeoffs.
I know that I use some gross heuristics and simplifications when making significant purchases (even though I have some training and natural bent towards product analysis).
> I think you are implying that we should socialise losses
I'm not implying or taking a stance on anything political here — I don't have an opinion either way nor do I want to get into right-to-repair arguments — I'm just saying it's not pigouvian tax.
Sorry, I wasn't trying to be political, but cheeky (I actually hate the overuse of the cliché I allude to). I didn't say anything about pigouvian tax.
I was trying to say that "informing" oneself is a very expensive hidden cost.
I felt your phrase "people buy products before sufficiently informing themselves" nonchalantly implies consumers should bear an unmeasurable hidden cost. We have a variety of solutions to help consumers avoid such unfair and wasteful costs (including Fair Use legislation).
No, the relevant pigouvian tax would be about the waste stream from products which aren't feasible to repair and which are trashed, and the environmental damage in producing and transporting replacements. When we all have microplastic _in our bodies_, and we're on a downward spiral of making ever cheaper, shorter-lived products, it seems really bewildering to hear someone claim there are no externalities.
The externalities are on the new products, not the right to repair, so a true pigouvian tax would be on the sale of products that can contaminate our environment regardless of repairability. (Otherwise, people would still be encouraged to just rebuy the product out of convenience even if it's repairable.)
As I said elsewhere, I'm not saying there shouldn't be a tax, I'm just saying it wouldn't be a pigouvian tax.
Well, there are but they are small and better targeted upstream/downstream as either a carbon tax or a waste disposal tax (both things that can, to at least some degree, affect other people). But I agree that appropriately sized taxes relative to the actual externalities seem unlikely to change behavior in this case.
I think this is ignoring the feedback loop between market demand and product design. It is entirely possible for cheap products to crowd out good ones such that good ones no longer exist in the market no matter how “informed” you are. Indeed, as discussed in this very comments section, appliances are already there, pretty much every brand of fridge or washer/dryer is shit now regardless of how much you spend.
It is entirely possible that the overall social optimum is that the very cheapest tier of product needs to not exist in order to get the volume for decent models to have good economies of scale etc.
The political problems section is what to read, in general, no one is going to vote this on themselves.