Categories
insider corruption too much government

Engineering Government Limits

Lord Acton’s Law of Power states the chief problem of government: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

It has broad application.

Take traffic lights. They are there to prevent accidents and make navigating roads a better experience for all. The basic idea is to establish and enforce a few basic rules and then let civilization proceed at the pace set by the people themselves. It won’t be perfect, but it won’t be tyranny, either.

But controlling traffic lights is a kind of power. 

And thus open to corruption.

Just ask Mats Järlström. After his wife got a “running a red light ticket” in Beaverton, Oregon — a town characterized on the show Veronica Mars as completely wholesome and innocent of guile — Mr. Järlström researched the yellow light timing system.

Using a sophisticated “extended kinematic equation,” obtained from his work background in Sweden, he sought to right the wrong that led to his wife’s ticket and found himself mired in government overreach.

You see, the Oregon Board of Examiners for Engineering and Land Surveying objected to his practicing engineering without a license.

The board sought to bury his findings about how yellow lights have been calibrated in Oregon — which he had shown encouraged behavior that would allow governments to maximize revenue … not safety.

That’s corruption. The intersection lights’ setup turned a safety measure into a means to fleece motorists — and the engineering board corruptly twisted its mission to suppress the truth. 

Thankfully, the Institute for Justice stepped in, and Järlström won in court.

Oregon now has new intersection lighting standards, and the power of the government professional board has been curbed.

A win for limited government!

And Common Sense, which This Is. I’m Paul Jacob.


PDF for printing

Oregon, licensing, Mat, traffic,

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts


Categories
free trade & free markets Tenth Amendment federalism too much government

Hairdressers Unbound?

Joe Biden, late of the U.S. Senate and Blair House, is not someone I typically rush to for policy advice. Were I looking for a weather vane to indicate whence bad ideas come a‑gusting, in full poisonous gasbaggery, Biden might serve as well as any of the budding socialists now running for the presidency.

But he has a clue about one thing: Occupational licensing.

Last week, Biden came out against the cosmetology licenses so common in states throughout the union. “Joe Biden knocks licensing requirements for hairdressers,” Philip Wegmann summarized on Twitter, “says it’s ridiculous that licenses take ‘400 hours’ of training: ‘It’s all about not helping workers.’”

Now, this is hardly a federal issue for a president to tackle. And Biden sure seems to be itching to run for the top banana position that he was so close to for eight years.

But states can do something — about their own stupid regulations. As Arizona just showed when the legislature passed a bill to acknowledge the occupational licenses from other states when a person moves to Arizona. This allows more freedom of movement among the states, and brings the state back into line with the common market idea of the U.S. Constitution. Governor Doug Ducey is expected to sign (or may already have done so, by the time this is published): it sure fits with the governor’s proclaimed desire to roll back regulations.

And this notion of openness and inclusion could be extended to other issues. You know, like concealed carry permits.

After all, states universally recognize all others’ drivers’ licenses. If you may navigate a metal-​and-​glass mortician’s little helper based on your state’s licensing, surely you can clip hair safely enough.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


PDF for printing

Joe Biden, licensing, salon, Occupational licensing, cosmetology, license

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
Accountability crime and punishment folly free trade & free markets general freedom ideological culture moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies privacy property rights responsibility too much government

Working to Boost Unemployment

Some government officials work overtime to throw people out of work.

What I’m referring to differs from losing your job or business because of slack performance or slackening sales. Instead, you lose the right to earn your living a certain way so that the government can benefit competitors at your expense.

Occupational licensing is great at dis-employing people. The regulations are especially galling when the work being regulated obviously requires no formal training in order to be done well and safely.

Hair braiding, for example. 

The Institute for Justice — which has done incredible work over the years representing victims of destructive government mandates — just won a victory for hair braiders in Iowa. Thanks to IJ’s efforts, a new law there exempts braiders from having to waste time and money getting a cosmetology license in order to practice their craft.

Such battles are never won permanently, of course. Washington, D.C., recently started requiring day care providers to get a college degree or lose their job. (As I have argued in a Townhall column, the same “logic” would justify forcing people to get college degrees to become parents.) IJ is helping affected parties to challenge the absurd law. 

It is time for a new licensing requirement. Nobody gets to become a local, state or federal lawmaker unless he first writes a million times in a row, “I will never help violate the rights of any man or woman to earn an honest living.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 


PDF for printing

 

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Businesses Rate Governments

What do small businesses worry about the most? I mean, besides serving their customers?

Regulation — licensing in particular.

At least when rating government, owners of small businesses surveyed by Thumbtack​.com indicated that “licensing requirements were nearly twice as important as tax rates in determining their state or city government’s overall business-friendliness.”Thumbtack.com's state ratings in terms of small business concerns.

Yes, taxes are a burden. But regulations and licensing can be amazingly arcane and costly in many communities. Their burdens often kick in before you’ve made a dime, and, despite that, they can sneak up on you, with the heavy weight of bureaucracy descending like the proverbial brick ton.

Thumbtack’s page allows you to see how your state rates. Idaho and Texas come out on top, and my state, Virginia, is surprisingly good. “Blue states” (horrible term: sorry) tend to come out much worse. California gets a big fat F, scoring abysmally low in most categories.

No surprise: The most politically unrepresentative state in the union over-regulates!

Distrust the survey? Just talk to the owner of a small business — you’ll likely get corroboration. Tim Sutinen, a businessman from southwest Washington State, noted in his campaign for state office a few years ago that there were only a handful of licensed occupations in the Evergreen State during the economic downturn in the early ’80s. Now, a few decades later, there’s over a thousand occupations you need a license to work in.

No wonder the recovery stalls.

That’s not progress.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.