Remade in America: When Used is Better Than New

"Assembled in USA"

I did a tune up of my snowblower to get ready for the winter. I replaced the gummed up old carburetor with a new one. As an experiment I bought an OEM "made in the USA" carb for about 8x the cost (~$80) of the equivalent chinesium knock-off. Unfortunately the carb was just assembled in the USA, probably from the same parts as the chinese ones. Oh well.

Credit finance inexorably drives the value out of every single thing it touches whether it's cars, consumer goods, jobs, or building materials, or even food. An inevitable outcome of that is "used" products end up being more valuable than their new counterpart. An old lawn tractor, car, or an old chainsaw, etc... ends up being more useful and long lasting than a value engineered (planned obsolescence or more prone to fail) sweatshop made product.

It will be really interesting to see what happens in the car market over the next decade. Auto makers are attempting to convert automobiles into giant consumer electronics devices that cost tens of thousands of dollars. Now that many components of a car are "smart" and include sensors and electronic gizmos, simple repairs, like replacing a cracked windshield, can now cost over $1000 instead of $200, and its all but impossible for owners to service them, and in some cases corporate auto makers are blocking independent auto mechanics from servicing their products.

By contrast, cars from the 1990s and 2000s were engineered for value in many cases, and car makers were competing on quality and durability.

What happens when the aggregate pile of already produced consumer goods is worth as much or more than future production?