Plumbers

I'm not having a go at this trade in particular - plumbers are victims of the monetary system. It's just that my boiler is playing up and I was thinking about the call out cost of plumbers (perhaps heating engineers) - the money you pay them before they actually start fixing anything. In our current system making a boiler that doesn't play up would be impossible, because most people would not have or be prepared to part with enough money to buy one, and they would have to cost a lot of money because there would be no need for servicing / repair, and that's money and jobs.

And the job of plumber / heating engineer is so specialised and its practitioners so scarce they can proverbially "charge what they like".

We'd be one step nearer sanity if we knew the lifetime costs of  things - in this example all the parts and labour expense (plus of course fuel and water) as well as the up front cost of buying and installing the system. But total sanity only comes when we systems think. The boiler should be built to last. The home should be built to conserve heat, so that it needs a smaller boiler, if any.

In our homes we don't want to pay the plumber and we don't want to create work in the home for us or anyone else. Why do we want to do this at country and planetary level?