It actually is logical to require a license to cut hair, specifically for safety reasons you mention.
Barbers / Hair Stylists are waving sharp pointy blades around your scalp, eyes, ears, mouth. If you don't know what your doing, you can cut or seriously injure someone (even just accidentally).
Additionally, those tools are easy transmission vectors for diseases (both from potential cuts, and from bugs like lice).
It doesn't take a lot of training, the two years for licenses mentioned in the article is ridiculous and should be reduced. (As an example, Michigan's license requirements are less than half the time+cost of Nevada's requirements mentioned in the article).
But Barbers have been licensed for 70-100 years (depending on the state), and there's a good reason for that -- you really do want to ensure everyone practicing that profession has some basic safety training and experience first, and the government seems like the best organization to ensure happens.
And, note, this creates a public health issue, not just one affecting their direct customers (even though the direct effect is on customers.)
going further, where I am, pretty much everyone in the food supply chain does actually have that training, and the food supply chain is very trustworthy because of it. Perhaps you just didn't notice because it all works so well.
I know several people in the profession and they're severely underpaid if you consider both their skill and knowledge.
The stereotypical image of an all male barber shop giving men buzz cuts with a clipper is appealingly boring, but the work clusters inseparably with womens beautician type work, and that work can be crazy.
They use corrosive dyes and peroxides and bleaches that will damage your skin or destroy your eyes both as a victim or as an employee. Used correctly its safe as a surgery scalpel.
They insist on mixing technologies that are very problematic for the general untrained public to mix, like water and electricity, as either victim or employee.
There can be disease issues, not quite of the level of a biohazard lab, but you want at least some minimal standards and of course some of the chemicals used for sterilization are not necessarily safe for the general public to screw around with as either victim or employee.
This was a "local news issue" a couple years ago where the big bad state was attacking "retired beauticians cutting hair in their basement part time" but they carefully don't mention its more than cutting hair, there are open containers of high strength hydrogen peroxide in a residential house with kids in it, or the hair dryer not plugged into a GFCI outlet next to the running water sink, etc.
WRT danger and risk its about one or two steps beneath the truck driver with a CDL and hazmat cert, or the electrician who does the wiring for a public pool, or the welder at the local nuclear plant... and the hoops to jump thru are also, appropriately, about one or two steps lower. From a high risk down view as opposed to low risk looking up, its not unreasonable.
If you propose separation of the harmless hair cutting stuff from dangerous stuff, then the tear jerking starts about problems of scale and unless there is a level playing field of identical training only giant salons will be able to afford the specialized and soon to be rare training to color hair or whatever.
It makes a great straw dog, but is a pretty good match compared to other fields.
You mean there are no "safety reasons" involved in cutting hair? A person with sharp implements around your head and neck poses no safety risk?
Also, even if the "safety reasons" are more compelling for dentists than for barbers, that's still not a reason to have the government doing the safety checks by means of licensing. Private organizations could do the same safety checks--plus, they would have an incentive to do only the checks that actually added value, whereas government has an incentive to impose any requirements that have enough of a political constituency, whether or not they add value.
"value" wouldn't have to mean increased safety for the consumer, though. The incentive on the part of private enterprise could just as well be to impose any requirements that increase profits, whether or not they add value.
A true absence of regulation would mean that individual people would have to make their own judgments about who was reliable, in health care and everything else. Sure, anyone could call themselves a "doctor", but that term would mean nothing by itself; it certainly wouldn't confer any special privileges on the person using it. If you wanted to know if a "doctor" was qualfied, you would look at his actual qualifications: where he got his degree, if he has one (and was it a diploma mill or a real school), where did he do his internship and residency, what sorts of cases has he worked on, what is his success rate in treating various conditions, etc. (Many people already look at these things even in our current regulatory regime, as evidenced by the number of websites whose business model is to provide such information.)
Would some people make bad decisions in such a regime? Of course. But people make bad decisions now. The question is which regime do you think produces worse decisions: a regime where everyone knows they are individually responsible for making good decisions, not just about what health care to get but about who to get it from, or the regime we have now, where people are encouraged to just accept particular credentials (M.D. degree, "board certified", on the list of preferred providers for their health insurance) as sufficient and not look any further.
Laughable. There was days without regulations, they didn't come out of nowhere cause someone was feeling bored. I don't want to go back to that time.
How do you explain the supplement industry then?
What time, exactly?
> How do you explain the supplement industry then?
They are responding to market demand. If people are willing to buy supplements without having any information about whether they are safe and effective, then someone will be willing to sell them.
My solution to this "problem" would be to remind people that they will have to bear the consequences of their decisions, and then let them decide--and bear the consequences. That means people who make bad decisions will have bad things happen to them. But at least everybody is aware that it's up to them to not be one of those people.
Your solution is to have the government do the evaluation of whether the supplement is safe and effective--or at least be willing to prosecute sellers who mislead their customers. In other words, you think the government can somehow prevent bad things from happening to people who make bad decisions--or would, if they were allowed to make their own decisions instead of having the government decide for them. But, as someone else pointed out upthread, the government doesn't actually do that--even with all this government regulation, we still have industries like the supplement industry full of hustlers trying to sell people bogus products, and they don't get stopped by regulators and they don't get prosecuted when they deliberately mislead customers. So bad things still happen to people--but now it's worse, because people think the government regulations are protecting them, so they don't think they need to take any other precautions, but the protection they think is there isn't there.
Unfortunately, no one wants to see the elephant in the room. Both types of entities will do (or at least have the risk-of doing) what is in their own best interest. But only one can have a violence-backed monopoly advantage.
It's constrained by laws, ethics, and economic forces.
It really isn't even very constrained by that. It helps if people are generally virtuous, but even an institution where the majority of the people are of good moral character, can display pathological behavior if it's poorly designed.
2. Monopoly. There is no "but they are doing it so we have to, too" race to the bottom.
For example, the only reason the FDA had the power to go against Elixir sulfanilamide was that it was mislabeled, not that it was killing people.
Government is not better, than private companies.
Reflexive secrecy is antithetical to democratic government, but that's a completely different issue.
Private organisations have an incentive to increase profit, even if it means a loss of public safety.
Accountability only provides economic leverage when legal remedies for tort and malpractice are cheap and easily available.
If they aren't, private organisations have no incentive at all to act responsibility. Often they don't.
I think hairdressing may be a special case because salons serve a local area, and it's a very social profession, so bad word of mouth can do a lot of damage.
But that's not true of most businesses. In fact of the drivers of the corporation as a business model is exactly the freedom it provides from personal and social responsibility. Instead of being personally accountable to customers, larger corporations operate at a level where local reputation is meaningless, and only governments, class actions, and the occasional PR disaster can punish bad faith operation. (Of all of those, PR disasters are often the least damaging.)
There are licensing requirements for corporations trading in specific fields and for specific products. But there's no such thing as a valuable and reassuring general certificate of corporate professionalism and responsibility - which is perhaps a strange thing considering the power and influence corporations have.
So the dentist in the license-free world have no ecnomic motivation to not just rip peoples teeth out with a pair of pliers?
People can self-regulate for risk and safety when they have complete information about the business. That would not have been available decades ago, but today we have the Internet and can easily move to interconnect everyone with common protocols to discern reviews and criticism of business to give consumers a more informed choice when choosing potentially dangerous trades, without crippling innovation and entrepreneurship within their domains.
This is often not the case, as stated above.
Which conveys misinformation as easily as accurate information -- and this is particularly the case when there is any significant interest, including economic/financial interest, motivating the misinformation.
(Also the internet is filled with 95% garbage)
1) Charge someone for dental work. 2) Injure them. 3) Profit?
We have laws against injury.
Someone didn't learn anything from the 2008 crash and the issue of private ratings agencies...
Privatize safety checks and businesses will shop around to get a certification.
Believe it or not, capitalism doesn't solve every problem.
By stamping shit debt as AAA, they were providing a wonderful level of service for their customers -- the bankers.
The whole banking and financial system at that level has its tendrils wrapped so firmly around the gov't (and vice versa) that a failure there is hardly an indictment of free market principles.
But wasn't part of the problem that there was competition among them? They were handing out favorable(fraudulent) ratings becuase they were trying to poach customers from the others?
It doesn't solve the problem of the combination of gov't corruption and private sector corruption, so private safety regulators/inspectors would never be able to keep anything safe.
Will the regulation actually be modest? A person braiding your hair (uncommon among the white middle-class American community but quite common in African-American communities) poses a trivial health risk, and there are many cases of where the relevant occupational licensing required thousands of hours of (substantially unrelated) cosmetology training:
http://ij.org/case/washington-african-hair-braiding/
http://ij.org/case/missouri-hair-braiding/
http://ij.org/case/txbraiding/
http://ij.org/case/utah-hairbraiding/
http://ij.org/case/taalib-din-abdul-uqdah-v-district-of-colu...
http://ij.org/case/cornwell-v-california-board-of-barbering-...
http://ij.org/case/armstrong-v-lunsford/
The stories are pretty much the same. "They used to require 1000+ hours of unrelated cosmetology training. Now they require posting basic sanitation standards, a written test, and a $25 fee. Thousands have entered the business." And these are just some of the cases that one nonprofit has taken and won. You can bet there's plenty more out there in many, many fields.
Of course, if we want to be fully ridiculous, note that Louisiana once required occupational licensing to arrange flowers:
http://ij.org/case/meadows-v-odom/
http://ij.org/case/chauvin-v-strain/
... or look up the cases on interior design... or the sale of headstones...
In New York, regulations have virtually eliminated common frauds. For example, funeral homes are required to place prepayments in escrow in an interest bearing account. That protects you from unscrupulous or failed funeral homes disappearing with your money.
Funeral directors are also not allowed to upsell your relatives after you have pre-planned a funeral.
It didn't occur to me that allowing people to systematically defraud the elderly and grieving folks might save me money.
It seems to me that anyone who is in favor of the regulations should at least have some kind of data to show that the above is not the case.
Economics doesn't work that way. If a company is out to maximize profit (and any company that stoops to fraud is almost certainly out to maximize profit), why would they wait until regulation to artificially raise prices? Their prices are as high as they can go already.
Harmful regulation raises prices by raising the price of inputs and raising the marginal cost of an additional product, resulting in fewer transactions being profitable and a deadweight loss to both the consumer and producer (split according to how price-sensitive the two sides are.)
"As high as they can go" in what sense? If you mean their prices before regulation were determined by supply and demand, then the market was working and there was no need for the regulation. If you mean their prices were determined by something else, what?
> Harmful regulation raises prices by raising the price of inputs
That's one way regulation can be harmful, but not the only way. Another way is for it to outlaw positive sum transactions that, in its absence, would have taken place. You're assuming without proof that the regulations in question "know" exactly which transactions are the "right" ones to outlaw. No real regulation has ever been anywhere close to that accurate.
I was thinking that this example of rent-seeking would come from non-governmental associations trying to justify their existence. If all safety checks were unnecessary, would that entity really phase them out or try to find more checks and initiatives to remain relevant?
Ah, but this isn't really for "safety reasons", it's for "legal reasons". Sweden is widely regarded as one of the (if not the) most safety concerned countries, after all we "gave"(1) the world Volvo and Autoliv (among others). Yet the idea of regulating barbershops for safety reasons is totally alien here. We tend to trust that people have a common sense. This seems not to be the case in the US. This is mostly because of the legal system, whereas in Sweden you cannot sue someone else because you lack (or pretend to lack) common sense. In fact, the idea would never even occur to most people here.
(1) No, we're not giving away Volvos, you need to buy one yourself.
> This is mostly because of the legal system [..]. [T]he idea would never even occur to most people here.
As far as I understand it, your argument was that the US regulates hairdressers because of its legal system. Germany also regulates hairdressers but doesn't have the US's legal system (in fact, it's closer to Sweden's with regard to suing over common sense). So as far as I can tell, Germany invalidates your assessment.
When I get medical bills, I have a lot of difficulty trying to figure out why the service I consumed could possibly cost as much as I am being charged. But I apparently agreed to pay whatever as a condition of obtaining the service.
This is not a point that transfers 1:1 to a hair stylist.. the odds and consequence of a stylist cutting me vs a dentist tapping a nerve is.. huge.
I don't see how licensing makes a difference.
When anyone can practice dentistry, both the range of bad experiences and their distribution gets much worse.
Sometimes this license is very light like "yeah I can pass a written driving test".
And as others have pointed out, it's more than a bad haircut at stake. Especially if you're a female -- some jackass wielding some dye or chemical can damage your hair or scalp permanently.
It's easy to criticize this stuff when you live in a society where you benefit from a well-regulated trade in all manner of services.
There may be some free-market lunatic who is in favor of unlicensed Dentistry, but I am not one of them.
So many currently licensed professions should remove the school requirement.
If you can pass a Hard state test, why not issue a licence?
Of the top of my head get rid of the education requirement for contractors, realtors(get rid of this profession all together, never understood the need for them.).
In California, under certain circumstances you can sit for the bar exam without going to school. I always felt if you can pass the bar, especially a hard exam, like CA, NY, why not let the person practice? Why make them go to joke non-ABA approved schools, and then take the test? Or, waste money in ABA approved law schools? Especially these days, when we have the Internet?
For profit career schools weren't previously eligible for federal student loans -- and were cheap. Now you have largely unaccredited, for profit institutions sopping up taxpayer guaranteed loans and ripping people off.
I totally agree about realtors though. It's such a tautology - they're "necessary" because they have access to private information, but that information could just as easily be public if the system worked a little differently.
I'll see myself out.
You can't take a person off the street and have a fully functional barber in a day. The professions above, you can.