Occupational Licensing Roundup #1

[-]Phil Scadden11mo*171

While I agree that the examples are stupid, I am not so sure about the electrical and plumbing. Connecting things to a public water supply that result in contamination from backflow/siphoning is very bad. You also dont want to electrocute a power pole worker who thinks power is off, but your house with DYO solar connection suddenly starts exporting power to grid. If I was insurer, I would take a dim view of unregister plumbing or electricial work in your house because of fire and flood risk. Where I live, so long as you are owner of property , you can do electricial that doesnt involve swithboard or cables coming into switchboard from street. Fair compromise? Drainlaying rules are still extremely strict though.

[-]AnthonyC11mo20

I think the things we need in those scenarios are permits and inspections before completing the connection/installation of the new stuff, which I have always needed in any state I've lived in in addition to needing to use licensed plumbers and electricians.

[-]Ruby11mo113

My regular policy is to not frontpage newsletters, however I frontpaged this one as it's the first in the series and I think it's neat for more people to know this is a series Zvi intends to write.

[-]Templarrr11mo10-1

Two things to note.

First - I feel like putting every occupation in the same pile and deciding are you for or against licensing isn't helpful? I personally don't need licensed lawnmower, but I would very much prefer licensed doctor. The cost of mistake in two occupations differs a lot and can be used for a threshold which jobs should require a license.

Second - there should be a difference between doing a thing to yourself (argument can be made even that here we shouldn't have any limits), doing things for free to your friends/relatives with their full knowledge of your skill level and experience (most of the non life-threatening things can probably be allowed here) and selling your craft for money.

[-]AnthonyC11mo42

I get the same instinct, but on reflection I don't endorse it. How much work in ensuring doctor quality is state-level required licensing actually accomplishing, as opposed to medical school graduation, residency completion, malpractice insurance premiums, employers (for anyone who doesn't run their own practice), and legal action (including lawsuits as well as criminal negligence and similar charges)? For whatever part may be additional and due to licensing, how does that stack up against the effects of restricting the supply of doctors, increasing the price of medical care, and reducing the ability of patients to receive telemedical care or consultations from experts or specialists who happen to be in another state?

Even if there is a licensing regime of some sort, I think there should be automatic reciprocity among all US states and territories, and between the US and a list of other countries with reasonably comparable or better standards. Same logic should be applied to drug and medical device approvals.

[-]AnthonyC11mo*80

The obvious follow up is indeed ‘why only military’? License portability should be universal.

I assume the short answer is: This is a group that is small enough not to credibly threaten anyone's wages, sympathetic/virtuous enough that people feel uncomfortable or expect to pay a price for arguing against them, and not actually in control of where they live. If nothing else it opens up surface area for other attack vectors, once people realize with data that those dastardly New Mexican plumbers can also safely fix toilets in Denver.

On music therapists - something like 15-20 states require this, yes. My wife is a therapeutic musician, not a music therapist (trained to play live music for patients in clinical settings, not interactive, not part of an ongoing treatment plan) - not a whole lot of overlap despite the similar names. There have been times where MTs have tried to get legislation passed to prevent TMs from practicing.

Personally I'm amazed that this hasn't come under fire over the decades by more litigation under the Interstate Commerce and Full Faith and Credit clauses. Somehow it applies to driver's licenses and vehicle registrations but not (again in CO because I have the list open) landscape architects and... boxers? Really? Especially for things like telemedicine, where it's illegal for my therapist to talk to me on the phone or send me a text if I'm not physically in their state. Theoretically if they're part of a larger practice it's illegal for their own office to talk to them if they're traveling. I'm honestly baffled how this would stand up to real legal/constitutional scrutiny. Say I'm traveling in NH, and call my doctor's office in MA to ask them to refill a prescription at a pharmacy near me, and the office calls my doctor who happens to be at a conference in CT that day, to confirm what they should do. On what grounds could NH and CT claim this is accomplishing anything whatsoever? As the patient I can move (most) prescriptions around between pharmacies and states whenever I want, I can see doctors in whatever state I want. As a doctor, you can see patients from whatever state you want as long as they travel to you and not the other way around. Yet it's illegal for the doctor to come to you, or to talk to you without either of you traveling.

[-]Donald Hobson11mo50

I think part of the problem is that there is no middle ground between "Allow any idiot to do thing" and "long and difficult to get professional certification".

How about a 1 day, free or cheap, hair cutting certification course. It doesn't talk about style or anything at all. It's just a check to make sure that hairdressers have a passing familiarity with hygiene 101 and other basic safety measures.

Of course, if there is only a single certification system, then the rent seeking will ratchet up the test difficulty.

How about having several different organizations, and you only need one of the licenses. So if AliceLicenses are too hard to get, everyone goes and gets BobLicenses instead. And the regulators only care that you have some license. (With the threat of revoking license granting power if licenses are handed to total muppets too often)

[-]rotatingpaguro11mo10

Related, I have a vague understanding on how product safety certification works in EU, and there are multiple private companies doing the certification in every state.

[-]Davidmanheim11mo20

Question for a lawyer: how is non-reciprocity not an interstate trade issue that federal courts can strike down?

[-]AnthonyC11mo40

I'm not sure, IANAL, but I have wondered the same thing. Apparently there is this lawsuit in NJ: https://pltrust.org/blog/news/interstate-commerce-professional-licensing

Makes me wonder if the temporary relaxations of standards during covid made this a more defensible claim, since it meant imposing non-reciprocity was taking something away instead of not having allowed it all along. That might give a lot of plaintiffs standing to sue where they may not have had it previously?

[-]FlorianH11mo1-1

Wouldn't automatically abolish all requirements; maybe I'm not good enough in searching but to the degree I'm not an outlier:

With internet we have reviews, but they're not always trustworthy, and even if they are, understanding/checking/searching reviews is costly, sometimes very costly.
There is value in being able to walk up to the next-best random store for a random thing and being served by a person with a minimum standard of education in the trade. Even for rather trivial things.

This seems underappreciated here.

Flower safety isn't a thing. But having the next-best florist to for sure be a serious florist person to talk to, has serious value. So, I'm not even sure for something like flowers I'm entirely against any sort of requirements.

So it seems to me more a question of balance what exactly to require in which trade, and that's a tricky one, but in some places I lived seems to have been handled mostly +- okay. Admittedly simply according to my shallow glance at things.

Lived also in countries that seem more permissive, requiring less job training, but clearly prefer the customer experience in those that regulate, despite higher prices.

Then, I wouldn't want the untrained/unexamined florist to starve or even simply become impoverished. But at least in some countries, social safety net mostly prevents that.