Which can increase the original cost of the good.
... to better reflect it's real cost by including all the otherwise externalized costs.
I'm not saying that it's a net loss, nor that even if a net loss that it isn't worth it. But there is a cost there, and you are shoving it away on your quest to regulation instead of looking at it and deciding its worth.
What is the externality here? Trash left over when the product is discarded?
Regulating the manufacturer is a classic progressive roundabout way of not regulating the externality directly. Instead, perhaps a better solution would be regulating the amount of wasted resources / complexity to recycling, such that the consumer is made very aware of the environmental impact of a product that is no longer in use.
And if the consumer was truly bearing a non-environmental burden for cheap stuff that is hard to fix and breaks easily, they would keep name-brand businesses with durable products in business (and indeed, they do).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joMK1WZjP7g
The '59 Chevy gets 13.5 miles per gallon. [1] The '09 Chevy gets 25. [2]
Yes, modern cars are more difficult to maintain than older cars -- they require more specialized equipment to maintain, parts are more difficult to replace, so on and so forth. Modern cars are also incredibly more fuel efficient and safer to ride in, and much of that is enabled by the same engineering efforts that make cars more difficult to maintain.
1) http://www.automobile-catalog.com/make/chevrolet_usa/full-si...
