Earlier entries in this series: I, II, and III.

Had you ever realized we used to have a freedom to buy an effective washing machine that would also allow us to throw in a wayward sock after it had started? Since we weren’t vigilant, that unrecognized freedom was taken from us:

In 1996, top-loaders were pretty much the only type of washer around, and they were uniformly high quality. When Consumer Reports tested 18 models, 13 were “excellent” and five were “very good.” By 2007, though, not one was excellent and seven out of 21 were “fair” or “poor.” This month came the death knell: Consumer Reports simply dismissed all conventional top-loaders as “often mediocre or worse.”

How’s that for progress?

The culprit is the federal government’s obsession with energy efficiency. Efficiency standards for washing machines aren’t as well-known as those for light bulbs, which will effectively prohibit 100-watt incandescent bulbs next year. Nor are they the butt of jokes as low-flow toilets are. But in their quiet destruction of a highly affordable, perfectly satisfactory appliance, washer standards demonstrate the harmfulness of the ever-growing body of efficiency mandates.

There are so many freedoms we don’t even realize we have, which is why the Founders in their wisdom constructed the Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.