The Right to Work

http://reason.com/archives/2010/03/11/the-right-to-work

by MikeCapone • 16 years ago

27 30 16 years ago

reason.com

wendroid• 16 years ago

Full employment is a threat, not a promise.

idoh• 16 years ago

What does that mean?

dazzawazza• 16 years ago

When threatened it means labour camps, when promised it is (unfortunately) a lie?

imgabe• 16 years ago

So, in this brave new license-less world, how would we ever get any new doctors? Who is going to recommend a doctor he's never used before? If a charlatan sets himself up as a doctor, how many people have to die under is care before word gets around that he's really no good?

Maybe florists are taking it a bit far, but it's easy to see a yoga instructor could cause someone serious injury if they didn't know what they were doing. Even interior designers have to know about things like egress paths or they could end up creating a space that becomes a deathtrap in the event of a fire.

genki• 16 years ago

I notice the article didn't mention anything about engineers, either. Licensing doesn't make sense in every industry, but when people's lives depend on someone doing their job right, I think it's fair to require that someone demonstrate a minimum level of skill.

jacquesm• 16 years ago

Engineering is mostly critical because it is optimized for cost.

If cost wouldn't be such a major factor in construction then 'rule of thumb' and 'overkill' would be valid ways to get around having the knowledge to get an exact answer.

In olden times it was customary for the designer of an arch to stand under the arch when the construction scaffolding was removed. This quickly eliminated those that were not capable of constructing stuff that held up, even if it led to some constructions that were probably more solid than they had to be for their designed use.

On the other hand, that's why we can still marvel at some of this stuff today.

wooster2• 16 years ago

Funny you should mention that, as the doctor shortage in the US is at least partially caused by lobbying by the AMA:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2005-03-02-doctor-shorta...

SamAtt• 16 years ago

I don't think he ever called for a "license-free" world he simply pointed out that skilled people who don't have them shouldn't be prohibited from working in a field if someone wants to hire them.

I don't endorse a world without licenses either but I'd point out that the world got by just fine without them for centuries using apprenticeships and if my doctor retired and told me "I trained this person and he's who I'd suggest you go to" I'd take that recommendation a lot more seriously than I'd take a medical license.

jeffcoat• 16 years ago

Presumably, people would bootstrap themselves into careers in pretty much the same way they do now. Of the top of my head ...

1) Working with (or interning with) someone reputable, and getting their public stamp of approval.

2) Certification agencies won't suddenly cease to exist; they just wouldn't have any force of law. Nothing would stop you from refusing to see a dentist who isn't certified by the ADA, just like nothing stops you today from buying a toaster that's not certified by Underwriters Labs.

3) Speaking of underwriting, insurance companies have an enormous incentive to only insure competent people.

etc.

bobbin4• 16 years ago

it's not about a system without licenses, the problem is the violence involved in them.

If someone wants to give flower licenses that's fine. The problem starts when they start to claim the right to take your business from you if you don't have it. Or give you a fine. Or lock you in a cage if you don't pay the fine.

Of course the issue is more complex in cases of life and death, or just injury. My point is that it's necessary to consider what does a licensing monopoly entail. It entrails a group of people claiming the right to administer punishment backed by violence.

I know there are a lot of good objections to what I wrote, so many I can't address them all. I wanted it to point out the monopolistic and violent nature of government enforced licensing, not because it closes the issue, but because it's essential to understand this when speaking about the issue and contrasting that with voluntary, non coercive forms of licensing and quality control.

ZachPruckowski2• 16 years ago

The role of government is to protect the liberty and general welfare of the American public[1]. This involves trade-offs.

For instance, I give up the right to drive over 65 miles per hour on the highway in order to protect the safety of everyone else on or near that highway. It sucks that I can't drive as fast as I want to, and it's an affront to my liberty that's enforced with violence (cops will throw me in jail if I drive recklessly or persistently speed), but the government decided that that loss of liberty is less important than the damage to the general welfare if everyone can go as fast as they want (more car crashes and deaths).

Sometimes, the trade goes the other way. If we banned fast food, the general welfare would improve greatly. But the government (and ultimately the people who elected the government) decided that the resulting loss in liberty would be too great to justify.

In this instance, people lose liberty when they're restricted from holding certain professions[2] without licenses. But the general welfare is improved because now people can trust that their doctors and lawyers meet a certain level of quality[3] as determined by the state. The government weighed the lost liberty and the gained welfare, and made a judgment call. If we don't like that judgment call, we can vote for candidates who see things the other way (or donate to legislators who agree with your position, or start a grassroots organization and convince people).

[1] - There's also "establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence", but those aren't in conflict in these examples. Government policy still regularly makes trade-offs between them. [2] - strictly speaking, you can own a law firm or doctor's office without a license, you just can't practice law/medicine. [3] - whether licensing tests are great reflections of ability or knowledge is beyond the scope of this comment.

wooster2• 16 years ago

I feel like I've read this article in Reason before.

http://reason.com/archives/2004/01/09/flower-power

Semiapies2• 16 years ago

Nothing's actually changed since then.

ZachPruckowski2• 16 years ago

In the absence of state licenses, how does one prevent license mills? Right now, there are "colleges" (Diploma/Degree Mills) that will hand you a B.A. or B.S. or Associate's degree based on "life experiences". You write them a nice letter about why you think you deserve the degree, wrap it around a $1000 check, and you get your diploma in 6-8 weeks. If we abandon state-run license boards for professions like doctors, lawyers, or architects, then within a few months anyone will be able to pay a few grand to hang up a "Joe Schmoe, Attorney at Law" shingle in front of his office. The end result will be a lot of confusion for consumers, because unless a consumer's able to do hours of research, determining which licensure boards have sufficiently rigorous standards will be an impossible task.

marshallp• 16 years ago

By things such as group purchases or consumer reports. There's no accredition board telling you which stock to buy, must people just let their mutual fund decide.

bobbin4• 16 years ago

Let's say there are no state licenses, and you need a doctor, so you go to a hospital.

Would you be concerned about the quality of the doctor?

Would you be the only one to feel that way?

Would a hospital who is capable of addressing those concerns be more successful than one incapable of doing so?

Would you as a training doctor be concerned of the public prestige of your license?

Would you as a doctor be willing to work in a place who hasn't justified or proved its quality to the public?

of course these questions don't answer your main concern, but you post assumes in the absence of a government monopoly in licensing, people would be incapable of creating quality control.

There's a tendency to imagine a transition period and think it would be unsolvable because you can't think how it could be solved.

btilly• 16 years ago

The problem with your reasoning is that we have actually have lots of historical experience with what it is like when we don't license doctors. It was awful. I'm no fan of the AMA. But I like having doctors who know basic anatomy.

On all of your reputation issues, people's judgment of the quality of doctors is almost entirely a function of their bedside manner, and not their competence. If you just go off of reputation, and reputation is based on the decisions of lay people, the result is that competent doctors get bad reputations and confident charlatans get excellent ones. And health suffers accordingly.

A similar well-documented example are public health measures. My surface impressions of a restaurant are a bad guide for whether the cook washes his hands properly after going to the bathroom. And dysentery comes through infrequently enough that you won't discover this from your neighbor getting sick until far too late. But well-constructed licensing requirements solve this problem and save lives. (In fact there is good data suggesting that public health measures like these save more lives year in and year out than all of the advances of modern medicine.)

We also know what happens with public engineering. Before licensing requirements were created, the USA averaged one random bridge collapse per week. That's pretty bad. It gets rapidly worse if you get an earthquake. I live in an earthquake prone zone, and I am a very firm supporter of having the buildings I am around and in be built to standards created by qualified engineers, then inspected by properly licensed inspectors. California is among the few areas where significant earthquakes don't tend to come with massive loss of life, and I appreciate that fact.

I could multiply examples, but the flip side of the argument does not hold. The article is correct that there are a lot of stupid licensing requirements out there. The article is correct that the motivation is often restraint of trade. The article is correct that we're often all better off without those rules. But the article is dead wrong in concluding that we're better off removing all licensing requirements.

philwelch• 16 years ago

You can prosecute someone for fraud for claiming falsified or unaccredited credentials without requiring the government itself to accredit. Also, it's hard to justify why florists need to be formally accredited.

dkarl• 16 years ago

You license the licensers. It's called accreditation.

dwiel• 16 years ago

This reminds me of a friend of mine who has worked in the city department for years and spends his free time reading law. Despite that experience, he can't be a lawyer in Indiana and advise based on this knowledge without going to college first, no matter if he can pass the Bar exam or not.

_bfhp• 16 years ago

"John Stossel is host of Stossel on the Fox Business Network."

I was willing to humor Reason, but I won't humor Rupert.

AngryParsley• 16 years ago

"The world's greatest fool may say the Sun is shining, but that doesn't make it dark out." -- Robert Pirsig

Semiapies2• 16 years ago

Understandable reaction, but Stossel is at least an alternative to the red-meat GOP partisans in the Fox news media.

I was sad when they got rid of Radley Balko awhile back - he used his time working for Fox writing about misuse of force by the police and the failings of the drug war and thus explaining them to people who wouldn't have come across those realities.

owinebarger• 16 years ago

I expected an article decrying unions, but found one decrying the licensing of doctors and lawyers.

To use the case of florist licensing to condemn all licensing is an egregious leap. In general I believe it is sound policy to license professions where the ordinary consumer of their services cannot be expected to know how to judge their quality. Highly specialized professions dealing with the general public such as doctors and lawyers are obvious candidates. For the actuarial profession, you might argue that the hiring companies should be sufficiently sophisticated to judge their competence without formal credentialing. The hidden consumer in this case are the insurance regulators and the public relying on them. And, in fact, companies don't always require credentials in actuarial roles, but regulators won't accept annual statements without a supporting statement from a properly credentialed actuary.

I think lawyers are a problematic case. With most professions you can go to court if the designated gatekeepers are acting in an illegal or unethical fashion. The state Bar association, on the other hand, is going to be nearly impossible to fight for anyone who plans on making a living as an attorney. So, while I do support the goal of ensuring a base level of competence for a professional that may be the only thing standing between you and a jail cell, I am deeply concerned about the current mechanism for achieving that goal. The completely free market leaves too much blood on the floor for my taste to be worth considering as a solution.

The Right to Work

Related Stories