The government and its experts always know best, particularly when they determine who should be allowed into which occuption. From el gato malo at boriquagato.substack.com:
mark cuban has been having a busy day on twitter.
he led off with this missive which, especially in light of his having bravely disallowed comments, has been getting him dragged in the quote tweets all day.
it’s amazing to me that even after this number of uncontestably catastrophic fails, the cult of expert worship persists, but is would seem there is just no extinguishing the authoritarian flame in some folks.
this is very much on brand for cuban who earned no small notoriety during covid restrictions for literally hiring a team of snitches to go out and busybody their way around to see if businesses were “complying” and then wrote a crowing blog piece about it. (of course, you’ll now need to use the wayback machine to find it because he took it down. but THE INTERNET REMEMBERS.)
Government does its best to keep the poor poor. From Mark Nestmann at nestmann.com:
Should you have to pay thousands of dollars before you can legally work? Or be imprisoned because you don’t have the money to pay a fine?
Economic liberty – the right to support yourself without needless government interference – is a bedrock principle of what was once called the “American Dream.” And debtor’s prisons were supposedly abolished in a federal lawCongress passed in 1833.
But if you’re poor, economic liberty can seem more illusory than real. A case in point is the war many states are fighting against natural hair braiding – a beauty practice popular with African-American women. This type of braiding doesn’t require dyes, coloring agents or any chemicals at all. It’s much safer than bleaching hair or giving manicures.
Occupational licensing in most cases amount to state-enforced cartelization. From Simon Black at sovereignman.com:
In a major victory for common sense, a group of cosmetologists defeated an insanely stupid regulation passed down by the state of Louisiana.
Louisiana, just like the other 49 states in the Land of the Free, governs licensing requirements for dozens… hundreds of professions… ranging from athletic trainers to tour guides to barbers and cosmetologists.
And most of the time the licensing requirements are just plain idiotic.
In Louisiana, for example, the State Board of Cosmetology had formerly required an unbelievable 750 hours of training (which costs thousands of dollars) simply to be able to thread eyebrows.
(If you’re like me and totally unfamiliar with eyebrow threading, check out this video. You’ll probably agree that 750 hours of training is totally ridiculous.)
And so, in conjunction with the Institute for Justice, several Louisiana-based cosmetologists filed a lawsuit against the Board.
The Board backed down… passing a new regulation exempting eyebrow threaders from such pointless licensing requirements.
One down. 2,214 to go.
That’s right. According to the Institute of Justice’s study License to Work, there are over two thousand licensing requirements across the Land of the Free… and that’s just for low income jobs like manicurists or floor sanders. We’re not even talking about doctors and dentists here.
Another study from the Brookings Institute shows that nearly 30% of US workers require some sort of state license. That’s up from just 5% in the 1950s.
Many of the licenses truly defy any logic whatsoever.
The State of Michigan, for example, sees fit to require 467 days of education and training to receive a barber’s license, but only 26 days to be a licensed Emergency Medical Technician.
The State of California requires aspiring tree trimmers to have 1,460 days of education and training. But pre-school teachers only require 365 days.
The District of Columbia requires 2,190 days of education and training to be an Interior Designer, but ZERO days to be a school bus driver.
The State of Iowa requires 1,460 days for athletic trainers, but just 370 for dental assistants.
What exactly are these people trying to tell us about their priorities? Trees and furniture are more important than children? Hair is more important than health? Abs are more important than teeth?
Add up a bunch of petty tyrannies and you get a full-blown tyranny. From John W. Whitehead at rutherford.org:
“Whether the mask is labeled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus—the bureaucracy, the police, the military. Not the one facing us across the frontier of the battle lines, which is not so much our enemy as our brothers’ enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves. No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this apparatus and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others.”—Simone Weil, French philosopher and political activist
We labor today under the weight of countless tyrannies, large and small, carried out in the name of the national good by an elite class of government officials who are largely insulated from the ill effects of their actions.
We, the middling classes, are not so fortunate.
We find ourselves badgered, bullied and browbeaten into bearing the brunt of their arrogance, paying the price for their greed, suffering the backlash for their militarism, agonizing as a result of their inaction, feigning ignorance about their backroom dealings, overlooking their incompetence, turning a blind eye to their misdeeds, cowering from their heavy-handed tactics, and blindly hoping for change that never comes.
The overt signs of the despotism exercised by the increasingly authoritarian regime that passes itself off as the United States government are all around us: warrantless surveillance of Americans’ private phone and email conversations by the NSA; SWAT team raids of Americans’ homes; shootings of unarmed citizens by police; harsh punishments meted out to schoolchildren in the name of zero tolerance; drones taking to the skies domestically; endless wars; out-of-control spending; militarized police; roadside strip searches; roving TSA sweeps; privatized prisons with a profit incentive for jailing Americans; fusion centers that collect and disseminate data on Americans’ private transactions; and militarized agencies with stockpiles of ammunition, to name some of the most appalling.
Yet as egregious as these incursions on our rights may be, it’s the endless, petty tyrannies inflicted on an overtaxed, overregulated, and underrepresented populace that occasionally nudge a weary public out of their numb indifference and into a state of outrage.
Consider, for example, that federal and state governments now require on penalty of a fine that individuals apply for permission before they can grow exotic orchids, host elaborate dinner parties, gather friends in one’s home for Bible studies, give coffee to the homeless, let their kids manage a lemonade stand, keep chickens as pets, or braid someone’s hair, as ludicrous as that may seem.
Most occupational licensing, done ostensibly to protect the public, does nothing more than legally sanction occupational cartels. From Robert Patrick Shanahan at investmentwatchblog.com:
The United States is far from the land of the free these days. The governments in state capitols and Washington DC have confiscated our rights and are selling them back to us. American culture has shifted in a frightening way that has expanded the number of professions and industries that now require an occupational license to legally provide a service or start a business. This stifles business creation in many states and disproportionally affects low and middle income individuals the most.
Governments have overreached yet again in requiring a license to perform work that is not in the realm of public safety for consumers. Sandefur stated how it started and what it has become today, “Okay, yeah you gotta get licensing to do something that might be really risky to public health and safety and we accept little by little and eventually we have this growing trend where people are not allowed to work or start a business at all without first getting government permission.” Our insistence on government telling us what to do has hopefully peaked, but recent examples around the country might suggest otherwise.
Over the last 50 years, Sandefur pointed out, 1 in 20 Americans were required to get permission from the government to work by obtaining a license. This included obvious professions in the medical or educational fields. However, today, this number has exploded to 1 in 5 Americans being required to obtain an occupational license, essentially a permission slip from the government, to do their job. Other figures peg the number at closer to 1 in 4.
Is there any reason to believe this grotesque trajectory won’t continue?
