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Occupational Licensing Blunts Competition and Boosts Inequality (economist.com)
Occupational licensing -- the practice of regulating who can do what jobs -- has been on the rise for decades. In 1950 one in 20 employed Americans required a licence to work. By 2017 that had risen to more than one in five. From a report: The trend partly reflects an economic shift towards service industries, in which licences are more common. But it has also been driven by a growing number of professions successfully lobbying state governments to make it harder to enter their industries. Most studies find that licensing requirements raise wages in a profession by around 10%, probably by making it harder for competitors to set up shop.
Lobbyists justify licences by claiming consumers need protection from unqualified providers. In many cases this is obviously a charade. Forty-one states license makeup artists, as if wielding concealer requires government oversight. Thirteen license bartending; in nine, those who wish to pull pints must first pass an exam. Such examples are popular among critics of licensing, because the threat from unlicensed staff in low-skilled jobs seems paltry. Yet they are not representative of the broader harm done by licensing, which affects crowds of more highly educated workers like Ms Varnam. Among those with only a high-school education, 13% are licensed. The figure for those with postgraduate degrees is 45%.
[...] One way of telling that many licences are superfluous is the sheer variance in the law across states. About 1,100 occupations are regulated in at least one state, but fewer than 60 are regulated in all 50, according to a report from 2015 by Barack Obama's White House. Yet a handful of high-earning professions are regulated everywhere. In particular, licences are more common in legal and health-care occupations than in any other.
Lobbyists justify licences by claiming consumers need protection from unqualified providers. In many cases this is obviously a charade. Forty-one states license makeup artists, as if wielding concealer requires government oversight. Thirteen license bartending; in nine, those who wish to pull pints must first pass an exam. Such examples are popular among critics of licensing, because the threat from unlicensed staff in low-skilled jobs seems paltry. Yet they are not representative of the broader harm done by licensing, which affects crowds of more highly educated workers like Ms Varnam. Among those with only a high-school education, 13% are licensed. The figure for those with postgraduate degrees is 45%.
[...] One way of telling that many licences are superfluous is the sheer variance in the law across states. About 1,100 occupations are regulated in at least one state, but fewer than 60 are regulated in all 50, according to a report from 2015 by Barack Obama's White House. Yet a handful of high-earning professions are regulated everywhere. In particular, licences are more common in legal and health-care occupations than in any other.
If you want to help solve this, donate to the Institute for Justice. They are the most prominent organization fighting "license to be employed" laws.
The one who wields a brush applies dangerous chemicals to peoples faces.
As someone who has been involved in fashion, art, and glamour photography for some time, I find the article's dismissal of cosmetology licensing to be careless and poorly researched.
Applying makeup is a licensed activity because of significant health and safety issues related to hygiene and proper use of certain products (such as latex, for example, as used in the movie and theater industries). You could very literally lose an eye, go into anaphylactic shock, or get a nasty rash because some village idiot decided to play makeup artist and didn't know what they were doing. People doing this really DO need to know what they are doing.
Likewise, bartender licenses are less about memorizing obscure drink recipes and more about properly working within the law around alcoholic drinks and potentially inebriated customers. These licenses are not a burden to obtain (working with a non-profit art gallery, we obtained them for some of our board members so we could legally serve wine at our shows), and they are a serious intervention to help cut down on drunk driving, alcohol poisoning, and underage drinking.
Here in Texas, the licensing agency recently got rid of mandatory licensing of interior designers (my wife is one) and talent/modeling agencies (which, again, I'm familiar with through photography). The result is a total disaster in both fields. To do an effective job, interior designers need to understand building codes, proper construction techniques, when to call in a structural engineer, permitting, blueprints and drawings, special laws around commercial furniture, etc. But without a license, anyone who watches a bunch of HGTV and thinks they are the next Joanna Gaines can go represent themselves as a designer, and homeowners and businesses *don't know what they don't know*. And in the talent agency world, particularly in modeling, there is a HUGE problem of outright scams, not to mention sketchy guys claiming to "manage" models or singers, who act more like wannabe pimps.
So yeah, maybe licensing can be a bit of a protection racket in some industries, but it's way too easy to deride someone else's education from a place of ignorance about the service they are performing and the risks involved in the decisions they make.
(Also, make no mistake, this article isn't about makeup or pints of lager, it's about an ongoing, long-term, well-funded dispute about what the differences should be between a doctor and a nurse practitioner. The arguments about other industries are merely window-dressing.)
And of those 11k roughly 9k are inner city gang violence in just a few cities with strict gun controls, leaving roughly 1700 homicides for the rest of the rather large country. Add in a few hundred accidental shootings (those are dropping even as more and more guns are being sold) to round out the numbers.
Second as to your biased and incorrect claims about "assault weapons" First of all homicides using long guns of all types is usually less than 300 per year, lower than the number killed with blunt objects. Yes they get used in High profile, big news events but otherwise are very rarely used in homicides. They are not the biggest problem. Handguns account for the vast majority of firearm homicides.
Additionally regarding "Assault Weapons" That classification is based entirely on cosmetic features that do not impact their functionality. They are semi-automatic as are most firearms sold today. That means pull the trigger once and one bullet comes out. They are not automatic or burst capable. Such weapons have been tightly restricted and controlled since 1934 and since the Hughes Amendment of 1986 have become very expensive as no new automatic weapons can be sold to the public.
And yes one could argue that those other weapons could and should fall under the 2nd. Cannon certainly did. Citizens owned licensed warships and cannon. But more specifically, why shouldn't I be allowed to own them if I can use them safely? If by my negligence or intentional actions with said weapons injury or damage to others or their property occurs I would be fully liable. But if I can drive my Self Propelled Howitzer to the local public artillery range and safely send the rounds down range why not let me waste my money throwing 100 lb slugs of metal a few miles downrange? If I use it inappropriately and cause harm or damage throw the book at me.
As to Nukes (people love to bring up Nukes) they are not safe to use anywhere due to the spread of fall-out thus they are not in consideration.
No I'm not going to campaign or push for the right to own my own howitzer (I can already own one if it's a muzzle loader) but if we go back to the principle of holding people responsible for when their actions harm others why shouldn't a responsible owner be able to own one?
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
Try four or five mass shootings. The 317 number is from the admitted propaganda site shootingtracker.com and they do not follow the established definition of Mass shooting: 4 or more non-family fatalities. If you stick to the long used FBI definition we are getting about four or five such horrible events a year, out of over 100 million gun owners. . Even left leaning, anti-gun MotherJones.com has called them out on their falsely inflated numbers.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.