Does North Carolina really need to impose burdensome licensing requirements on athletic trainers, locksmiths, irrigation contractors, librarians and a dozen or so other occupations?
Over at NC Capitol Connection, Center for Law and Freedom lead counsel Elliot Engstrom explains how the state has gone overboard on occupational licensing.
“It’s gone too far,” he said. “It’s being used by incumbents to keep people out of their trade and raise prices and needs to be reined in. So we could do that by combining licensure boards, we could do that by getting rid of some of the licensure requirements.”
So it’s good news that a measure to trim some licensing requirements and boards is starting its way through the General Assembly. To find out more, click here.
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Though I understand from reading above there maybe tactics to block people from trades, such professions as Substance Abuse Processional and License Marriage and Family Therapist have invested thousands of dollars to become license through advance degrees and doing clinicals. To eliminate my licenses places me at risk for hardship and the loss of specialized care. People dont see a neurologist to treat heart conditions. I work with many other licensure (no insult to them) that dont have the specialization in subtances or marriage and family treatment. I supervise and spend much time teaching and giving oversight. This differs greatly from the other licensures listed .
Licensure makes sense for some professions. For many professions, it really is just a way to reduce competition or increase prices or in some cases both.
I am in the computer networking business. I install Cat5E & Cat6 cable. The voltage carried by this is either 5 or 12 volts. So minimal that even a small child would not be harmed by touching a ‘live’ network cable. Yet there are those pushing to force me to acquire a license. Foolishness, pure & simple.
I once had a local inspector insist that I have a low-voltage license to pull Cat5E cable in a local business. When pressed as to the specific code requirement, the inspector could NOT point to it. I did some online research (naturally) and found where the specific requirements were listed as to what did & did not require licensing. The inspector was not impressed and insisted that if I believed no license was required, I could petition the town’s inspection department for exemption. Overbearing regulators are almost worse than the proponents of useless licensing. Since I was able to prove, using specific wording extracted directly from code, that licensing was not required for installing network cable, I insisted that petitioning the town inspection department for exemption wasn’t just foolish, but pointless and a waste of my time. I refused the job instead. So, even without licensure in place, the ignorance of the local inspector prevented my small business from earning a living by denying me a job opportunity.
Forcing MORE licensing on small business is counterproductive. And proponents of licensure understand this completely.