licensing laws — VOICES for REASON

In a fascinating article, the Wall Street Journal reports that the percentage of workers who need a state license to do their jobs is growing steadily. That percentage was 5% in the 1950s. In 2008, it was 23%.

Think about it: one of every four workers is not permitted to work without begging permission from a bureaucrat. While I don’t agree with the article’s assumption that licensure is an acceptable government activity, and I don’t find the quoted experts’ analyses particularly deep, I recommend the article for its catalog of occupations on which licensing requirements have been and are being imposed. A sample:

Florida for years required anyone marketing their services as “interior design” to get a license that called for six years of education and apprenticeship and a two-day exam. That requirement stunned Barbara Vanderkolk Gardner, a mostly self-taught designer who worked on luxury homes in New Jersey—no license required—and wanted to open a practice in Florida. If clients wanted to hire her to pick out pillows, paints and furnishings, Ms. Gardner says, she couldn’t understand why the state would object: “I view myself as an artist, and I don’t think art needs to be licensed.”

Ms. Gardner worked with the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit libertarian law firm, to sue the Florida regulatory body in charge of interior design in U.S. District Court in Tallahassee, claiming the law violated their First Amendment rights to call themselves interior designers. A federal judge last year struck down the licensing law for residential designers. But the court upheld a requirement for commercial interior design, holding that the state had a rational basis for protecting the public from inept design, which could create safety hazards.

Ms. Gardner says her residential business is now flourishing in Sarasota, Fla., but she remains frustrated that she has to turn down jobs designing offices.

In Ohio, dieticians, athletic trainers and boxing promoters are among the professions that require licenses. If Kimberly Raisanen has anything to say about it, cat groomers might one day make it onto the list, too. Ms. Raisanen, a groomer in Fairview Park, Ohio, helped found the Professional Cat Groomers Association of America in 2008 to establish better education standards for the animal specialists who trim, clip, style and fluff felines.

Do readers have their own stories of licensure’s effects on people’s ability to practice their occupations? I’d like to hear them through the comment function at the bottom of this post.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

The Wall Street Journal had an interesting article recently reporting on, of all things, the question of whether horse-teeth floating—the filing down of horses’ teeth to maintain their oral health—should be subject to government regulation. According to the Journal, the Texas board of veterinary medicine has been aggressively lobbying the state to take action against those who float teeth without a veterinary license, and has ordered two dozen such floaters to cease and desist. Four of these floaters have responded with a lawsuit, arguing the cease-and-desist orders violate their rights under the Texas constitution.

This case raises the issue of government licensing in general, which has been rapidly expanding over the past half-century. The Institute for Justice, which is backing the floaters in their lawsuit, reports that the number of American workers subject to such government oversight has increased from 3 to 35 percent in the past 50 years. Licensing laws are a critical point of entry for government intrusion into individual lives, with everyone from real estate agents to hairdressers (!) being forced to obtain government permission to make their living.

People often view licensing as a necessary safeguard against unqualified practitioners of a trade. But there’s an important distinction between government licensing and private certification. Private agencies exist in many fields, from interior design to bookkeeping, that offer certification assuring a level of professional competence. There is no reason why, on a free market, customers would have difficulty obtaining an independent assessment of a given practitioner’s qualifications and skill. Indeed, there are often multiple private certifying bodies competing with one another to offer the best guarantee of excellence. And companies such as Consumer Reports and Angie’s List offer advice on a huge variety of products and services.

But such agencies merely offer their expert opinion, they don’t have any power to force their judgment on anyone. Read the rest of this entry »