If this doesn't make you fume with outrage, you might be having a stroke right about now....
The licensure rate in this country has gone up 5 fold in the last 50 years or so. Why? There are three reasons I can think of, none of them are beneficial to consumers and all are corrupt....
1: With the ever-expanding nanny-State requiring more and more of our money, raising taxes again and again was obviously unpopular so local governments decided to create out of thin air, onerous and arbitrary criteria and force business owners to qualify to operate a business. Then they charge a huge fee for getting this license, and you must renew it over and over. Plus, failure to comply resulted in punitive financial penalties too, so they got you either way.
2: Existing business owners paid off politicians to create these absurd licensing boards in order to discourage competition. Less competition means they could charge higher prices.
3. The new licensing regulations meant the need for licensing boards staffed with lazy, bloated, self-important bureaucrats. To corrupt, incompetent bureaucrats, nothing makes more sense than to expand the regulatory bureaucracy. It makes the government unions stronger and increases the control they wield over regular citizens.
If this guy can't cut hair, his customers will stop coming and he'll self-regulate out of the barber business, no regulatory board necessary. That's how the free-enterprise free market works.
Obama promised(and by "promised" I mean lied) to remove the onerous regulations that hinder job growth and small business expansion, but we'll see if stupid licensing regulatory boards are abolished as they should be.....I won't be holding my breath.
2 comments:
There was an excellent article in the WSJ last week on the explosion of jobs subject to licensing and regulation - usually at the insistence of those in the business. Clearly, creating barriers to entry makes those already involved able to charge more. I mean come on, florists?
Yeah, it's all about existing business owners bribing bureaucrats and politicians in order to keep competition out of the market-place, and about generating revenue, under the phoney guise of safety and competency regulation. It's insidious and unamerican.
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