The Tyranny of Licensure
Would you want an attorney to defend you if he never passed a Bar Exam? What if he never completed law school? If he didn’t have a law license? Likely not. The reason seems obvious, if you are going to place your life or liberty in someone’s hands, you want to make sure that they are qualified to take that responsibility.
But what about your hairdresser? Your plumber? Your local lemonade stand? Do these people need to be licensed? To what end? If you don’t like your haircut, don’t go back. Do you care whether your barber has taken X hours of training on how to properly clean his brushes if the inside of his shop looks like it hasn’t been cleaned in 14 years? Do you care that your plumber passed a standardized test if he can’t figure out how to fix your pipes?
Licensure has noble roots, intended to protect consumers from charlatans that aim to take advantage of them. If you had no information available to you at all about a traveling dentist, you’d probably want to see that he was licensed before letting him pull your teeth. Otherwise you could end up the victim of a scam with fewer teeth and money than you need and a lot more pain than you want.
Today, those scenarios aren’t as common. Most people would never pay for a service without reading some on-line reviews or doing some research on the internet. Armed with overwhelming access to data, people today are far more interested in the star rating and reviews than the date a business last paid their State dues. Some argue that the advent of readily accessible reviews and consumer reports renders licenses wholly redundant and they may have a point.
Some licenses really don’t make a lot of sense. Take hairdressing for example. In Tennessee, in order to get your license to shampoo hair, you have to take two exams, which cost $140, pay an annual $40 fee, and go through 300 hours of training “on the theory and practice of shampooing.” The tuition for the 300 hour training costs approximately $3,000.
Even if you believe some requirements are necessary to ensure adequate credentialing and public safety, current licensing rules provide other seemingly unnecessary prohibitions. If you are a licensed hairdresser in California and you move to Oregon, your license can’t come with you. Surely the art of cutting hair doesn’t dramatically change as you cross state lines, does it? Bangs are still bangs, scissors are still scissors!
So if many of the requirements don’t make sense, and licensees are limited arbitrarily in where they can practice their craft, why doesn’t the government do something to make it easier to work and get a job doing what you’ve been trained to do? There are numerous organizations that argue that exact point. Who thinks this is a good idea? Who would have an objection to more plumbers starting a business in your city?
The plumbers that are already working there. More relaxed licensing requirements mean more competitors and more competitors means lower prices. Existing businesses and industries could innovate, focus on customer experience, and work to stand out from the pack…or…they can prevent the pack from ever existing. The more expensive, time consuming, and tedious it becomes to make it into a profession, the fewer folks are willing to jump through the hoops. Even those that may be adequately or even superbly qualified by means of talent, may be turned off by the red tape. That’s good for business. Especially because it’s a lot cheaper and a lot easier to keep people out than actually providing a better service.
This is an example of a concept called regulatory capture, something in direct conflict with the principles underpinning the rule of law. The law is supposed to treat everyone equally, and on first glance, licensing agreements seem to do just that. Sure they may be tedious and absurd but everyone has to deal with the same absurdities. That’s true, but just as with all forms of regulatory capture, the wealthier, more established businesses and individuals have an advantage, they can pay lawyers or consultants to parce out the requirements or pay for expensive training courses to better prepare themselves for tests.
Supreme Court Justice Jackson never completed law school. He left after his second year. In most States he wouldn’t be allowed to get a law license today. Yet despite his “lack” of credentials, he was the U.S. Solicitor General, served as a Justice on the Supreme Court, and held the position of chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg Tribunals after World War II.
If he were going to defend you in a criminal trial, would you care at all whether he had taken a standardized test and paid $500 a year to a bureaucratic organization with a palatial office near the State Capitol?
Licenses are no guarantee of quality. In the absence of other information they can let you know that the person or business meets the industry’s bare minimum requirement to conduct business but nothing more. You’ll still need to look for reviews and reports and consult your own judgement before deciding whether they are the right pick. In a world with extensive licensure, you’ll just have fewer, more expensive options.
