3:00 A.M. and the Right to Repair Bullshit

My God.

I woke up at 3:00 in the goddamned morning. Wide awake-the price you pay for falling asleep early-and did the one thing I do when my brain refuses to shut up: I opened Instagram. It’s the only social media I still tolerate, and mostly just barely.

Somewhere in the scroll, there it was. A politician breathlessly pushing the Right to Repair act, the same one I wrote about last week, framed as some noble crusade for farmers everywhere. The claim? That farmers aren’t allowed to fix their own tractors.

That assertion is bullshit. And the proposal behind it is worse.

First: farmers don’t actually own these tractors. These machines cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. They’re financed, leased, or loan-encumbered. And anyone who’s ever leased a vehicle understands this basic fact of life: you don’t get to modify equipment you don’t fully own. That isn’t oppression, that’s a contract.

Second: modern tractors aren’t tractors anymore. They’re GPS-guided, sensor-dense, computer-controlled robots driving themselves across fields with absurd precision. I grew up in farm country. I know exactly what passes for “field repair” in a pinch: bailing wire, duct tape, and WD-40. That works fine on a busted gate. It does not work on a rolling data center worth half a million dollars.

And now we’re pretending that letting untrained, non-technical users dig into proprietary control systems is somehow a victory for autonomy?

Third, and this one really pisses me off, why is the government involved at all?

If you don’t like John Deere’s terms, here are some radical ideas:

• Buy a different brand

• Buy used

• Keep what you have and fix what you’re allowed to fix

• Or don’t take on debt you don’t agree with

That’s how free markets work. Or at least how they’re supposed to.

This bill isn’t about fixing your own stuff. You can still do that. It’s about forcing companies to hand over trade secrets and internal systems under the feel-good banner of “rights,” then making manufacturers eat the cost when something inevitably goes sideways.

So what happens next?

• Are warranties now honored even when user error is obvious?

• Who pays when complex systems are damaged by bad repairs?

• Where does responsibility actually land?

Because it sure as hell won’t land with the person who made the mistake. It never does.

And that’s the real danger here. We’ve started treating government like a cosmic customer service desk, something you call when life gets inconvenient. Contracts become optional. Responsibility becomes negotiable. Every problem becomes legislative.

This isn’t empowerment. It’s infantilization.

The role of government was never to legislate hardship out of existence. It was to protect liberty, provide common defense, and set stable systems around things like currency and borders, not to step in every time a market outcome hurts someone’s feelings.

Slippery slope arguments get mocked, but here’s how precedent actually works: once you decide government should solve this inconvenience, you’ve already justified solving the next one. And the next.

I’m not usually an alarm-bell ringer. But it’s long past time we stop outsourcing personal and commercial responsibility to the state and start reclaiming it ourselves.

Power doesn’t belong in legislation. It belongs with the people willing to own their decisions.

Just saying.