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Why license so much?
November 11th, 2008, 4:37 pm · 15 Comments · posted by by Alan Bock, Register editorial writer
Just to be provocative: A commenter on the previous post about gun control posted the following, and I thought I’d discuss it in a new post:
“Cars and drivers are licensed.
Pilots and planes are licensed.
Boats and skippers are licensed.
Dogs are licensed.
Amateur radio operators are licensed.
Marriages are licensed.
Attorneys are licensed.
Doctors are licensed.
Veterinarians are licensed.
Electricians are licensed.
Voters are licensed (except in North Dakota).
Hunters are licensed.
Fishermen are licensed.
But somehow guns are supposed to be special.”
Well, there’s the fact that weapons are specifically mentioned in the Bill of Rights with the language “shall not be infringed,” which a license amounts to. But that’s not my main point. I want to challenge the necessity or wisdom of having the government license so many people and activities. We libertarians really do believe in a lot more freedom to do as we will without special government permission so long as we’re not harming others.
I frankly question the necessity of licensing cars and drivers except as a revenue producer. Insurance companies could do it and probably do it better. I know this is a severe minority position, and I don’t think society is on the verge of collapse because of such licensing, but it’s worth thinking about.
How necessary is it to license dogs, ham radio operators or marriages? Licensing of doctors and attorneys, like most occupational licensing, is mainly a scheme to reduce competition and raise the income of licensed practitioners with few if any benefits for consumers. Electricians and veterinarians? Same story. You missed hairdressers. Licensing hunters and fishermen also amounts mainly to a revenue-producing scheme; limits are a cover to make believe there’s a conservation motive.
It’s not a question of guns being special. It’s that our society is already vastly over-licensed. The fact that something that has little or no business being licensed is now licensed is no argument for licensing something else. It’s an argument for delicensing, which would increase freedom to engage in economic and other harmless activity, thus increasing our health, wealth and happiness.
UPDATE: Sorry I missed pilots and planes, boats and skippers. Insurance companies might require licenses or some evidence of competence, but any benefit to society at large is small in comparison. Let the main beneficiaries pay the freight for the system. Airlines would want a certificate, but there’s no reason it couldn’t be a private certification rather than a government license.
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It is our human nature that compels us to control others. Government is our most powerful way to exert that control. Most of us do not study history and thus forget what happens when we do not suppress our desire to control. Therefore, we license our fisherman.
What arrant nonsense. Anyone who thinks the “market” could provide self-executing quality control to prevent peoples’ finances, fortunes, health and/or lives from being ruined by unqualified and unlicensed practitioners of any of the listed occupations is deluding him or her-self.
The cynical claim that it’s all about self-protection is an easy cnard to throw out when you haven’t been in a society that (for example) would let unlicensed surgeons cut into your parents, on the theory that the market will weed the guy out if he’s incompetent. By that time, unfortunately, your parents are very, very dead. Might the snake oil salesman among them be exposed eventually? Possibly (and only possibly), but at what collateral cost - not just to society as a whole but to the reputation and business prospects of those remaining in the given profession. Regulation assures a stable market in all those occupations and services - to the benefit of the practitioners and the public as a whole, who can reasonably have some degree of faith in the comptetence of their fields’ practitioners, and so be more likely to avail themselves of their services. As with so ,many areas, regulation fosters and promotes the free market by setting common sense boundaries for it. Without regulation, the market inevitably descends in Darwinian savagery. In a time when the collapse of unregulated securities - and unregulated in a very deliberate way, based on the very idea of self-policing advocated by mr. Greenhut - threatens the foundations of modern economies, do we really need to teach this object lesson again? Have we really learned so little? Or is ideology blinding some to simple realities?
The last two items on the list are different, of course, but no less valid. Licensing of hunters and fishermen is as much a matter of controlling and maintaining adequate populations of animal quarry as anything - any hunter knows that overhunting is the surest way to kill off (no pun intended) the fun for everyone. Ask any would-be commercial fisherman in Massachusetts the real large scale social cost of unregulated overfishing in the Grand Banks, and see if they’re as excited as Mr. Greenhut about letting people fish (or hunt) away without some external limits or regulations.
This is the sort of Fantasyland ivory tower utopian libertarianism that keeps it (and its usual political standardbearer, the Republican Party) on the fringe - first in California, and now increasingly in national politics. Ideology is a wonderful placid place, unconstrained by messy real world complexities. That’s why it’s so tempting to buy into wholesale, and why it never works in that messy and complex real world.
Where exactly is this libertarian nirvana you dream of? A bad Ayn Rand novel? Wasilla? If this libertarian philosophy is so good, why hasn’t it competed its way into existence? Libertarians didn’t give you your freedoms and libertarians don’t defend it.
As for guns, I rarely give them a thought except when they show up on the political scene. Having reasonable controls on them certainly wouldn’t keep you from having them. That they show up in the national discourse at all is childish.
How necessary is it to license dogs, ham radio operators or marriages? Licensing of doctors and attorneys, like most occupational licensing, is mainly a scheme to reduce competition and raise the income of licensed practitioners with few if any benefits for consumers
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Dog licensing is for sure just a money taxing scheme to fund government with no real purpose, and the same goes for Ham radio operators (who knew they needed licenes).
BUT, medical doctors and attorneys are not schemes to raise money-but to protect the public from incompetent docs and lawyers-and beleive me there are plenty out there.
I will say the difficult process lof getting a law license in CA (CA Bar Exam= 45% overall pass rate) does evidence non competition. In fact Michigan is so low on lawyers that they have recently RASIED their bar pass rate/cut off to over 90%-if CA ever started to experience a lawyer shortage (hehehehe) then you would see the same thing here which proves up the non competition portion of the licensing scheme.
I’m going to unleash some of rlh’s “Darwinian Savagery” today. First I’m going to make some unlicensed repairs to my home, then I’m going to prescribe myself some of my wife’s painkillers, and then I’m going to drive my buddy’s car with expired registration so I can make some unlicensed repairs to the heavily regulated-SMOG devices.
I will post back at the end of the day and let you know if I am still alive.
Have a nice day, Travis - hope everything goes well. It won’t prove a damn thing insofar as our discussion here goes, of course, but it’ll be killer clever, won’t it.
PS - watch the painkillers - don’t want to get you hooked.
Vicodine= Hmmm good.
Somehow I knew rlh would come forth to recapitulate some tired old conventional wisdom to defend the world against us dangerously untrammeled (and unlicensed!) seekers after more freedom.Imagine the “Darwinian savagery” of being able to go to a hairdresser or barber not because they had gotten permission from the state but because you like the way the or she cuts your hair. Or hiring a handyman because a neighbor says he did a good job rather than because the state has certified his ability to pass a written test. The horror!
As it happens, there’s a fair amount of scholarship (I still haven’t figured how to put links in comments — probably because I’m not licensed — so I’ll do a new post later on) on licensing schemes. I’m not aware of a single instance of an occupation being licensed as a result of consumer complaints or consumer demand. It’s always the “profession” itself that wants to be licensed because practitioners know it’s a way to limit access, decrease competition, thereby increasing income — and keep quality control “in the family.” This goes for the medical profession and legal professions as well, for which a plausible case might be made, but for which the documentation is quite extensive. Little or no evidence of higher quality or fewer complaints after licensing — but plenty of higher prices after the cartel has been established.
Nothing stops you from going to a barber, or a handyman, because you like their work. The but for/instead argument posited is misleading - it presumes a complete inability to use someone you like regardless of their licensed status. You’re free to have an unlicensed contractor do your back porch - the law sanctions him, not you - but when the porch collapses because it was shoddily built, crippling your party guests and running up a homeowners’ insurance tab that exceeds your coverage limits, good luck chasing him down to hold him responsible. Oh, and that invasive unnecessary licensure of insurers? It means that your insurer will actually pay the claim (presuming they play by the rules, as we know insurers always do, right?).
Boy, what an anti-free market bit of socialism that is . . .
Licensing of contractors (for example) helps ensure quality and accountability, provides penalties for shoddy unlicensed operators, and so protects the public. Countries like China are great at allowing anybody to build - or design, for that matter - buildings, without regard to such niceties as qualifications or regulation. Of course, their buildings have a nasty tendency to collapse, but what the heck.
Claiming that licensure is unnecessary because “Joe on the next block does the work great without a license” is sort of like Mr. Landsbaum’s critiquing climate change theory because it was cold last week - it ignores the overall macroeconomic effect by focussing on the microeconomic incident. Joe - be he a plumber, a barber, a contractor, and insurer, or a doctor - may well be good at his work. Fine. That’s one. It’s the overall social cost of not licensing - to the overall society and its health/homes/finances/legal situations - that’s important.
As for cartel-izing or professions, it’s no surprise that complaints stay the same, or increase, after licensure takes effect - after all, there’s a mechanism then put into place to take and process complaints. Accountability is encouraged and expected.
Most professional licenses are so easy to obtain that they do little to erect the sorts of entry barriers Mr. Bock posits. Mr. Landsbaum posted a few months ago about the licensing of manicurists along these same lines, only to remain conspicuously silent when someone noted the nasty fungal and other infections you could get from your cheap pedicure if health regulations weren’t observed. (Rotted off toenails, anyone?) Yet such shops are legion in Orange County, and usually run (excuse the oversimplified cultural stereotype here) by folks who are clearly fresh off the boat - and bravo to them.
The few professions that do have higher bars to clear, such as lawyers - well, that’s not a bad thing, the law IS a damnedably complicated thing, and rigor in the name of quality assurance (again, not guaranteed - only God can make guarantees) is just wise policy.
If Mr. Bock, or Mr. Greenhut, want to fly back to the next Libertarian convention in a plane piloted by an unlicensed pilot, who may or may not have any idea how to land the thing, let them. We’ll all light candles. Their heirs will be happy to know that the free market will make that airline less attractive to other potential passengers after the fatal crash. Well, maybe - if there’s perfect distribution of consumer information or the airline doesn’t have the economic power to suppress the bad news.
Theory, meet reality.
I agree with much of what Alan Block wrote-and have in fact made the same arguments about the teacher credentialing process, which is 2 years long.
There is NO test or other measurement of whether the teacher credentialing process produces a better teacher (it does not). If there is no way to measure input at the begining of the licensing and an improvement in the output at the end-then the licensing scheme does not hold water IMHO. A teacher credential is time consuming and veyr costly-10-30K. And there is no excuse for that time of investment without clear benefits.
But, medical and law must have minimum competency-especially medicine, where people die if the Doc is a moron.
‘As it happens, there’s a fair amount of scholarship (I still haven’t figured how to put links in comments — probably because I’m not licensed — so I’ll do a new post later on) on licensing schemes.’
Let me guess? A libertarian think tank.
I should have read this thread first.
RLH states the position I did to a lesser scale on another thread.
Bock et al continue to prove they live in a dream world. There is a neighborhood in Anaheim where this mindset is right at home, it’s called FANTASYLAND!!
Fantasyland is where all the public employee union welfare queens live at, where money grows on trees and the roads are paved with gold.
Johnny,
Libertarians (like myself) argue that licensing provides a false sense of security to end users.
There are an awful lot of people out there who believe that because the practitioner they hire is licensed, there is no need to further investigate.
They think that because a drug has been approved by the FDA it is safe to use (Vioxx, Thalidomide anyone?).
They think that because their contractor is licensed he is competent (I know contractors that I can’t believe have a license).
They believe that because a nurse is a licensed professional he or she is on the up and up (ever read the LA Times?).
The history of the AMA is a fascinating read. When they were granted a monopoly in licensing doctors, standard treatment consisted of phlebotomy and the consumption of mercury containing compounds. Their main competitors, homeopaths probably weren’t doing their patients much good, but at least they weren’t generally killing them.