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Comment by programmarchy | Hacker News Reader

Insightful post. Occupational licensing is regressive because it hurts lower income families the most. Single mother wants to run a salon from her apartment in the projects? Illegal. Guy wants to hustle cigarettes on the street? Death sentence.

Makes things more expensive for consumers, and totally chokes out small startups.

Licensing should be voluntary, and paid for by premium prices. Instead we have all these artificial monopolies crushing competition and distorting prices.

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Americans like safety more than they like free markets. You might feel otherwise, but US citizens have made their collective decision.

That's not true at all. As an American, I was never given the option to purchase an "unsafe" cigarette from Eric Garner - he was killed in order to prevent me from having that option.

I believe he is referring to the safety of a stable income, which such protectionism attempts to provide. If someone can come in and try to do a better job, then you are always at risk of losing your revenue stream. If the law prevents competition, then you can feel more secure in having that revenue stream for life.

The NYC policing of singles is clearly about taxes no matter what else they might say to justify it.

According to wikipedia, Garner was not primarily a cigarette salesman:

1. He had been a horticulturist at the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, but quit for health reasons.

2. Garner had been arrested by the NYPD thirty times since 1980 on charges such as assault, resisting arrest, and grand larceny.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Eric_Garner

With thirty arrests, he is best described as a criminal who used to work as horticulturist. Although:

"An official said he had been arrested multiple times for allegedly selling unlicensed cigarettes"

At least as indicated in the video of his death, none of this is relevant. He didn't assault any police officers when he was killed and he didn't appear to be resisting or committing larceny.

Also, you do know that "resisting arrest" just means "the cops don't like this guy", right? (I suppose it's easy for folks who don't interact with the police not to know this.)

We must have seen different videos, then, as it's very clear from it that he was resisting arrest.

Is this the one you were talking about? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpGxagKOkv8

PS: Can you tell just how biased you are? I'm curious as to how oblivious you are of your own professional shortcomings.

I just rewatched the video, module the actual killing part. He's having a conversation and pretty animated, waving his arms Italian style, when the police grab him. Almost immediately he's put into a chokehold.

Clearly the personal attacks bolster your case.

"And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed – if all records told the same tale – then the lie passed into history and became truth. "Who controls the past," ran the Party slogan, "controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. "Reality control," they called it: in Newspeak, "doublethink." (1.3.18)"

I think it's possible to believe: that Garner was not an ideal person; that the policy he was killed to enforce is wrong; and that his actual killing was wrong.

And to elaborate on this, wealthy societies "buy" all sorts of things via regulation that can't be directly purchased.

Americans "buy" consumer safety by enacting regulations that reduce competition and increase overhead costs.

Americans "buy" food safety by having government inspections and paperwork regulations that track supply chains in order to recall contaminated foods more quickly.

Americans "buy" clean air and water by enacting pollution controls which raise prices.

Americans "buy" fewer highway deaths by having lots of safety regulations on cars and putting up considerable trade barriers to imports (want to import a VW California to California? It's unlikely).

Most western countries "buy" the same things. I suspect everyone wants these things but not every country is rich enough to "buy" them. And it's easy to fixate on the costs of these things (and yes, sometimes regulations go too far or the costs outweigh the benefits) and ignore the benefits, which mostly benefit a different set of people than those who bear the direct costs. But in the end all of these things are "bought" by distorting markets via regulation.

Some people may actually disagree that using the term "buy" or "bought" is accurate here, because they may look at the "transaction" and say that the "cost" is not actually a cost.

In some cases it is -- paying for government food inspections costs time and money and so there is at minimum the opportunity cost of what else those resources could have been used for.

But some things that people say are "costs" -- hindrances on employment, keeping the number of professionals in a certain field artificially low -- may not be viewed as costs. Some may say it's good to have a throttle on employment in field X, not just because of licensing, but because making it super easy to jump into X is just not desirable for anyone and it's too easy for uncredentialed Xers to rip unsuspecting people off, or something.

I personally feel this way about Uber and Lyft services (but my opinion could change when self-driving cars become a part of that service). I'd love it if there were heavy licensing regulations for Uber/Lyft, and for drivers. I genuinely think everyone would be better off, and the "cost" of there not being an extremely liquid market for new drivers is actually not a real cost, that liquid market is more harmful for everyone than it is beneficial. We essentially get two "wins" -- regulated drivers leading to more safety, and regulated drivers leading to slightly slower pipeline of introduction of new drivers.

But grinding your workforce to death is ok?

How was this a collective decision?

Business leader lobbying politicians is not really collective

yes, clearly the entire population of the US opposes every regulation ever enacted by the government.

They didn't say it was all or nothing.

> Americans like safety more than they like free markets. You might feel otherwise, but US citizens have made their collective decision.

Yes, but your (or y'all's) collective decision that you prefer safety to freedom shouldn't infringe upon my choice to prefer freedom to safety.

>Yes, but your (or y'all's) collective decision that you prefer safety to freedom shouldn't infringe upon my choice to prefer freedom to safety.

I would also remind you that no classical libertarian(IE: John Locke) would allow you to go kill someone, and would say the state can and should have the power to regulate you to prevent you from doing so.

So I would equally assume that in no way shape or form Locke would be ok with you dumping Trichloroethylene willy-nilly.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3228569/

Unless of course you think it is ok to give someone kidney cancer and not tell them?

(Dumping tricholorethlyene willy nilly makes a super-fund site. It takes years for cancer clusters to clear out as they get cleaned up. The one in Mountain View related to chip manufacture has only within the past year or so stopped causing cancer clusters en mass. Most of the silicon valley superfund sites come from TCE, and were declared as such around 1988.

Though even today the EPA is cautious - people have seen TCE plumes in the Valley that still cause problems http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2015/12/16/discovery-of-t...

We're close to our 30th year of cleaning this stuff up. It is totally possible, and even probable, that if a pluse/area is massively disturbed, TCE will leach en mass into nearby people causing new cancer clusters, among other issues)

I can extend this logic easily to the Food and Drug Act and its amendments - which is why it is terrible to find out that the 5 largest producers of chicken in the US allow people to pee and poop on themselves on the killing floor, because in chicken slaughterhouses, you aren't allowed to have bathroom breaks.

http://qz.com/681025/big-poultry-workers-are-literally-peein...

Unless you think it is ok for you to potentially eat someone's very dangerous e. coli and salmonella from their asses because you want freedom?

(I assume, and hope not)

It's not a freedom if it kills you.

I agree, these kinds of regulations and over-licensing is what's killing jobs, not taxes (or at least not as much). You don't see many big corps complain about licensing or regulations, that's because they can afford to pay for them, small business and even individuals are the one who get screwed. This kind of stuff is what I would like to see Bernie complain about but I see very little from him on this front. The funny thing is that Northern Europe countries have way less regulations and licensing, this is why they survive despite super high taxation but you never see Bernie rooting for that, he just wants wants the high taxation from Sweden and high regulation/licensing from the US, ie the worst of both worlds http://reason.com/archives/2016/04/18/bernies-rightamerica-s...

Sigh. Really? Is this really what is passing for high quality discussion here these days?

Occupational licensing is a form of consumer protection in almost EVERY case.

We have taxi licensing because at one point, people being extorted by being dropped off in bad areas in the middle of nowhere unless they paid massive amounts of cash to a driver was common. Hell, it still is in a lot of parts of the world where licensing isn't enforced.

When a single mother with her salon causes a staph outbreak in your Randian paradise of no regulations because she can't be bothered to wash her scissors properly, what then? How does that help the "lower income families" that now can't pay for the medical services they need because they couldn't afford an extra $10 for a proper haircut?

We have medical licensing because too many quacks called themselves healers and fostered bullshit on too many ignorant people. Same with legal licensing, real estate licensing, etc, etc.

Your assertions fall apart with a thirty second google search into the history of why we have enacted these things coupled with some basic common sense. Yes, certain reliance on regulation has been used to stifle competition by established players, no that does not mean all regulation is bad. Cons and scams are a real reality in the free market, and not everyone has the means to avoid them, or worse to recover from them when they are victims. Any just market will have sufficient barriers and safeguards in place to provide a reasonable protection to consumers to ensure those consumers actually use their money on new services and products instead of being scared into a position of paying much higher prices for services from entities they trust.

Licensing is an incubator of a stronger economy; it allows people to be mobile with their money because it creates a lower boundary of competence and expectation.

Licensing based on the number of hours sitting in a classroom does not inherently protect consumers, but it does discourage employment. If the classroom hours requirements were eliminated and licensing was based on objectively demonstrating competency, some of the current impediments stemming from regulation would be diminished and consumer protection would probably increase.

Yes, some licenses have poorly defined metrics that are hard to properly evaluate.

No, ensuring people that claim to understand a topic they are selling their advice on as a product actually know what they are talking about is not a worthless endeavor.

Should a Doctor have to spend a certain amount of time performing operations even if they nail their first one? Should a pilot need to fly 50 hours in a circle even if he got his landings down in the first 3? What if a person can pass a law school final the day after they take the LSAT? Should they be able just to skip law school completely and be admitted to the Bar? Clearly law school only exists to discourage employment!

I'm constantly amazed at how so many of the people that don't think time invested matters at all never have time invested themselves.

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