On 01/22/2012 06:31 PM, MBR wrote:
Whenever government, be it Federal, state, or local, is given the power to decide who is allowed to do a particular thing, that power is inevitably abused to satisfy the demands of some powerful lobbying group.
But let's get back to professional licenses. The argument for why government should be able to control who can and who cannot practice a particular profession is that they're supposedly protecting the public from incompetents. If a doctor, a lawyer, an electrician, or an architect screws up, people may well die! Of course, in practice, licensing boards more often than not protect their own and incompetent practitioners generally keep their licenses as long as they don't piss off anyone on the licensing board. So the licensing system doesn't even accomplish what it claims to.
For the record, in nearly all professions requiring licensing/certification, it is not the government that decides who can practice. One of the hallmarks of a discipline being a "profession" is that it is self-regulating; i.e., a governing board or committee for the profession - made up completely of members of the profession - decide on what the appropriate standards of the profession are. (And as a result who is / is not deemed appropriate to practice it.) Nearly all professions work this way - medicine, law, accounting, etc.
Government intervention, if it gets involved at all, is generally only limited to things like enforcing that people can't practice the profession without a board-granted license.
That said, I'm only correcting what I see as a factual error, and am not staking out a position in the larger debate. (Wisely, I think.) :-)
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