• In Washington State, someone who wishes to braid hair for a living needs a cosmetology license. This license requires 1600 hours of education, not one hour of which involves braiding. This training requirement exceeds that required for emergency medical technicians – by an order of magnitude. In Arkansas, the license requires only 1500 hours of training. In Texas, someone who wishes to teach others how to braid hair and get paid for it needs to take 2250 hours of barber college education, pass four exams and open a full-blown barber school.
• In Georgia, someone who wishes to sell over-the-counter teeth whitening products out of a store that offers a place for those customers to use it is prohibited from doing so by the Georgia Dental Board.
• In Washington, D.C., someone who wishes to be a tour guide requires a license to do so. Literally, a license to speak.
• In Arizona, someone who wishes to provide massage services for animals needs first to become a licensed veterinarian.
• In Louisiana, someone who wished to fabricate and sell caskets was required to be a fully licensed funeral director and operate a mortuary with an embalming room.
• In 2011, the IRS wrote regulations that required tax preparers to be licensed.
This is a smattering of occupational licensing cases taken up by the Institute for Justice, a civil liberties law firm. A third of American workers require some form of license to do their jobs, up from 3% in the 1950s. Over 800 different jobs require licenses, up from 70 in the 1950s. Among these are (depending where you live) auctioneers, barbers, sign-language interpreters, tree trimmers, court reporters, interior designers, chimney sweeps, lobster sellers, turtle farmers, locksmiths, painters, nutritionists, athletic trainers, florists, real estate advertisers, taxicab owners, and prospectors. In Philadelphia, you have to have a license to blog. In Texas, if you repair computers, you must have a private investigator’s license. Licensing requirements vary widely by state, and while some occupations require licenses in all 50 states, in many cases, one or a few states require licenses for jobs that can be performed unlicensed in most other states.
Occupational licensing is one of the most under-reported infringements upon individual liberty in the nation. What is justified as a matter of public safety and protection is primarily a tool to shield the already-licensed from competition, to maintain higher incomes and prices by limiting the supply of labor, and to stifle those struggling to rise up the economic ladder, for it is often those who are already established in their professions who advocate the hardest for licensing. It should come as no surprise that H&R Block was strongly in favor of the tax preparer licensing scheme, and that owners of existing taxi medallions are the most vocal opponents of expanding the number of medallions issued or of new Internet-based services such as Uber and Lyft.
Even many who oppose what unions do don’t blink twice when groups of business owners, industry trade associations, or groups of independent contractors entwine themselves deep in the occupational licensing system and lobby for more stringent rules. Oftentimes, regulators go to the established businesses for assistance in writing regulations, and in some cases give those businesses de facto veto power over new licensees by granting testing authority to them.
It is an unfortunate truth that many believe the existence of an occupational license represents a validation of the holder’s skill or relevant training. While there are numerous professions where this is a fair belief (health services, for example), how much weight does a typical consumer grant to the fact that a florist or an interior designer is licensed, as opposed to trusting word of mouth, reviews, references, or one’s own judgment of that person’s past works?
Sometimes, licensing cannot be justified as anything other than rank protectionism. Consider auto sales. Generally speaking, if you wish to buy a new car, you have to acquire one through an auto dealer. You cannot buy directly from the manufacturer, even though it’s not hard to imagine the existence of a company website where you could simply “build” a car with all the options you’d like and have it delivered to you. Tesla Motors recently ran into this problem in Texas, where state law mandated that there must be franchised dealers selling cars. This is nothing more than protectionism for auto dealers, who apparently have powerful lobbies and friends in high places.
There is also a hard reality that many who come out of prison have a hard time getting occupational licenses. As just one example, good luck getting a liquor license to run a restaurant or bar if you have a criminal record. If it’s a goal of society to impose on wrongdoers a societal debt that has to be paid, shouldn’t society then accept the payment of that debt (incarceration) without making it permanently difficult for those wrongdoers to productively rejoin society?
Then there’s the enforcement angle. Back in 2010, over a dozen police officers engaged in a sweep of several minority-owned barber shops in Florida, without warrants, under the auspices of government business inspectors. Officials claimed they were looking for illegal activity, but mostly (34 of 37 arrests) just arrested people for barbering without a license. A Gibson guitar facility was raided by SWAT teams – twice – over allegations that certain exotic hardwoods imported for the guitars violated some technicality. A retiree who ran a home-based business importing orchids was subject to 6 months of surveillance and a SWAT raid. He ended up in prison for 17 months because the paperwork associated with his imports wasn’t done correctly. In Texas, a small organic farm was raided by a SWAT team that held the residents at gun point for half an hour, and then proceeded to confiscate some blackberry bushes, okra plants, sunflowers and tomatillo plants. The given reason was a search for marijuana plants (they found none), but it’s telling that the farm had received a handful of code violation citations recently (grass too tall, bushes too close to the road, wood improperly stacked, furniture on the lawn, etc). An Amish farm in Pennsylvania was raided by armed FDA agents because it was selling unpasteurized milk (a recent law change put the farm in violation of some technicality).
The government is systematically infringing on our rights in countless ways. Many of them are overt, and elicit protest and push-back from angry citizens. Yet the overt incursions are often far less insidious than those that creep in slowly and quietly, nibble by nibble, in a distributed and diffuse fashion. We’ve grown so accustomed to them that most of us don’t even think twice about them, and in many times approve of them. In doing so, we forego the very basic and crucial economic liberty that enables us to live free lives. All for protection and security that doesn’t even produce the promised benefits and results.
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