That depends how long things last on average. If things get 25% more expensive, but tend to last twice as long as a result of the legislation, they're actually much cheaper than they were before.
The problem is, consumers don't have a good way to compare product lifetimes, so they tend to judge based on sticker price. Mandating minimum lifetime makes these prices more meaningfully comparable.
Although personally, I think an even better market solution would be to mandate that products list price per guarantee-year prominently.
This is an interesting lead. Increasing consumer awareness would also incentivize companies to increase guarantee years, reducing perceived price.
So in practice, consumers have been conditioned to just assume that nothing is really guaranteed to last, therefore just buy the cheapest one. With the exception of certain brands such as Miele who are very popular among people with enough money to drop on the high up front price.
You're right in that this could potentially be addressed other ways, for example with packaging regulations. If it says "15 year warranty", then it shouldn't have any hidden terms or charges.
[1] Although with the EU guarantee after 6 months it's technically your responsibility to show fault, with large non-moving appliances the usual assumption is it's probably the device's fault.
I know it's a difficult balance to find, but sometimes you have to restrict the individual's freedom of choice to protect the environment and society as a whole.
Wasteful short product cycles may just fall into the category. Long-lasting products won't prevent you from buying the new stuff all the time. But instead of throwing away the old stuff, you might be incentivized to sell it to others who happily use older stuff.
You should be honest and say: this will hurt consumers but help the environment, and I feel that is worth it.
And can we please try to keep the snark out of the snarko-capitalist rethoric?
Still, if you have some specific suggestions to avoid this legislation, I'd honestly very much like to hear them.
This is just a government by another name.
Are you aware this will make everything way more expensive? Why don't they let people who care about extra warranty pay the premium and let the rest of us who don't care about it avoid the fee and pay cheaper. How about we let willing adults contract freely with each others instead of using the force of law and guns to force people into contracts governments think are better for us because we're too dumb to know better what's good for us and what to do with our own money? Crazy thoughts I know.