Yglesias on Occupational Licensing

I am outsourcing this post entirely to Matt Yglesias because it's awesome and it made me very happy to see how public choice has moved out in the world:

A number of people, including many commenters here and even alleged
conservative James Joyner think you should need a professional license to become
a barber because you might hurt
someone with a straight razor. Uh huh. At best this would be an argument for
regulating people who do shaves with a straight razor, which would be
considerably narrower than current comprehensive regulation of hair
stylists.

Meanwhile, though “torts and the free market will take care of it” isn’t the
answer to everything, it’s surely the answer to some things. Getting
some kind of training before you shave a dude with a straight razor is obviously
desirable in terms of strict self-interest. If you screw it up in a serious way,
you’ll face serious personal consequences and the only way to make money doing
it–and we’re talking about a very modest sum of money–is to do it properly.
People also ought to try to think twice about whether their views are being
driven by pure status quo bias. Barbers are totally unregulated in
the United Kingdom, is there some social crisis resulting
from this? Barber regulations differ from state to state, are the stricter
states experiencing some kind of important public health gains?

Last you really do need to look at how these things play out in practice. If
you just assume optimal implementation of regulation, then regulation always
looks good. But as I noted
in the initial post the way this works in practice is the boards are
dominated by incumbent practitioners looking to limit supply. One result is that
in Michigan (and perhaps elsewhere) it’s hard for
ex-convicts to get barber licenses which harms the public interest not only
by raising the cost of haircuts, but by preventing people from making a
legitimate living. States generally don’t grant reciprocity to other states’
licensing boards, which limits supply even though no rational person worries
about state-to-state variance in barber licensing when they move to a New Place.
In New Jersey, you need to take the
straight razor shaving test to cut women’s hair because they’re thinking up
arbitrary ways to incrementally raise the barrier to entry.

In principle, you could deal with all these problems piecemeal. But
realistically this sort of problem is inevitably going to arise when you pit the
concentrated interest of incumbent haircutters against the diffuse interest of
consumers. It’s hard enough to make sure that really important regulatory
functions related to environmental protection, public safety, and financial
stability are done properly.