/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

purposeful destruction of productive instruments:
>The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm#007

i'm not convinced it had much of an effect either way. it was conditional on trading in an old car while buying a new one, so the number of cars on the market remains static, and most of the eligible cars are off the road in other first world countries due to their age anyway. (e.g. NZ isn't overflowing with 1980s or early 1990s cars despite being poorer than the US and - as a small country - finding it very easy to be oversupplied with cars. It can be inferred, then, that most cars of that vintage wouldn't have made it to 2025 anyway.)

i guess you could say it eliminated them from the global market, but let's be real, no American's heart is bleeding over there being slightly fewer 1990 Corollas in Botswana.

What is efficiency? What is safety? What is confort?


Some things gommunists will never comprehend

>>2438996
It's effects were mostly the fact that a reliable 90s car that usually would have gone back to circulation and bought by someone else was entirely eliminated from the market. And hundreds thousands of working cars were destroyed because of this which meant all of these reliable cars that would have been cheap and accessible especially for people with low incomes are now gone. This also is one of the reasons the used market is fucked up to unfathomable degrees and everything is overpriced

Totally forgot about that. Wasn't it framed as a green initiative too?

>>2439017
Yeah it was an effort to "get rid of inefficient vehicles" which meant alot of perfectly good cars form thr 80s/90s

>>2439009
I'm still not sold - NZ's cars are older on average than America's and there's still not much in the way of early 90s vehicles on the road nowadays, let alone anything earlier. There are ~283 million cars in America today, so scraping 690,000 is a very, very, very small part of the market.
Then you can throw in other factors: Most of those cars must already have been worth less than $5-6k (otherwise it'd make more sense to sell them used than to scrap them.), they had to be younger than 25 years old (e.g. 1983 onward) and get less than 18 MPG (which the average new vehicle did before 1990), and a good chunk of them would be taken out of action anyway (the flip side of them selling cheaply is, at a certain point between 2008 and 2025 they're likely to become more valuable as parts than as a car…) or bought by hobbyists who needed something to do during covid. (post covid inflation + car sales slowdown seeming a more plausible explanation for any price problems at the low end of the market today.)

There was no Cash for Gameboys or Cash for useless STN-display 90s office laptops scheme, and both of those are now selling for prices that'll make you wish we'd bring back the Law of the General Maximum.