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Comment by sgarland | Hacker News Reader

I, for one, am extremely happy that electricians and plumbers have to be licensed.

Sure, but are you happy about the requirements of that licensing? Requirements that have continually expanded to require more "experience" over the years. I know in my state it was originally 1 year of experience or completion of a tech diploma and then you had to take the licensing exam. Now it is 5 years of experience and a diploma can count for one of those years. Which of course has pushed prices to insane levels.

Are you happy that the license is much less a license to do the work and much more of a license to hire unlicensed people to do all the work.

And lastly are you happy that private equity can "hire" the licensed professional to hire 100s more unlicensed people to run a huge company with a catchy slogan?

These are valid things to be unhappy about and should be corrected. But if the implication is 'licensing has issues so we'd be better off without' then I'm not on board. It reads like one of those 'if we can't have a 100% perfect solution, then we should do nothing' arguments. Licensing does have merits and I think currently they outweigh the drawbacks. If we can make licensing better by fixing some issues, then absolutely let's do that.

What would you propose as an alternative? Some concerns I have are: 1) my house not burning down due to electrical fire and 2) not exploding due to natural gas leak.

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