1.4: Warranty Information

Many user’s manuals contain a warranty — a promise that the product will function properly for some period of time, combined with an offer to refund the purchase price or to repair or replace the product if it breaks down or malfunctions within that period. Lifetime warranties are the best, both because they never run out and because they indicate that the manufacturer is very confident in the quality of the product. Other warranties are limited, covering only certain issues and only for a certain number of days, months, or years.

Unfortunately, America does not come with a warranty, not even a limited one. There are no refunds, no replacements, no money-back guarantees. You can’t pack America up and send it back to the manufacturers if it doesn’t meet your expectations: the manufacturers (whose names you can find in the appendices of this book) are all long dead.

America, as a product, is sold as is. As you’ll soon discover (if you haven’t already), it is a brilliantly designed product in many ways, but it still has flaws and limitations. Some of those can be fixed with the right modifications; others are essentially unavoidable, because “fixing” them would only cause even bigger problems. This user’s manual will help you recognize which is which, but it can only do so much. People disagree about which of America’s problems we should be trying to fix, or even whether they should be considered problems at all. One thing’s for certain, though: if anything about America needs to be fixed, it’s up to the users to do the fixing.

An unconfirmed story goes that in 1787, near the end of the writing of the U.S. Constitution, a Philadelphia woman asked Benjamin Franklin what kind of government had been created. He replied, “A republic...if you can keep it.” Franklin understood that the government outlined in the Constitution would not last long if it were simply left to rust. Lincoln understood it too, remarking 76 years later in his Gettysburg Address that “whether that nation...can long endure” depends on how dedicated its people are to ensuring that it “shall not perish from the earth.”

If America is to last, we the people — we the users — must use it properly, maintain it carefully, and try to find ways to improve it where we can, without forgetting why it was designed this way in the first place. In order to do that, it helps to understand what America is for and how it works. In other words, it helps to read the user’s manual.