A Stitch in Haste

"Danish, dammit! He was Danish!"

--Me, lamenting to David that the Circle Line tour narrator was wrong and that Jonas Bronck, for whom the Bronx was named, was in fact not Swedish.*

Now I may be an anal-retentive stickler for minutiae such as this, but at least I'm not a paternalistic, nanny-stater, anti-capitalist, central planner wannabe:

Philadelphia hospitality officials ... worry that the city's most valuable asset — its history — is being tarnished by unreliable tour guides who mix up dates and spice up the biographies of famous founders like Benjamin Franklin and George Washington.

The issue has sparked debate and a led to a proposed ordinance to test and license guides.
...
Guides in Williamsburg, Va., must pass a multiple-choice test that includes general Colonial and Williamsburg history. Licenses cost $100 and are good for three years.

In Savannah, Ga., prospective guides are given a 91-page manual to study before taking a $100 test.
...
Jonathan Bari, whose company offers a walking tour of Philadelphia, said licensing fees would most likely be passed on to visitors — and would not guarantee error-free tours.

There are two separate, and not mutually exclusive, reasons that such nonsense as "tour guide licenses" emerge. The first is Kip's Law: Every advocate of central planning always — always — envisions himself as the central planner. Some activist legislator thinks, totally subjectively, that mistakes by tours guides are an insufferable abomination that simply cannot be tolerated in a civilized society — and government must, simply must, do something about it.

The fact that nobody else gives half a hoot about this faux crisis means nothing. The fact that data on "tour guide quality" can be and indeed are provided by private services such as TripAdvisor and Expedia means nothing. To those caught in the trap of Kip's Law, politicians always know best, and government always does best.

The second is the Guild Conspiracy -- attempts to impose occupational licensing and registration that are mere attempts at rent-seeking: Convince (i.e., bribe) politicians to erect unnecessary, anti-market barriers to entry (often under the guise of "quality control"), thereby reducing competition and creating government-guaranteed profits for those in the guild.

There are several unarguable examples of pure, unrepentant Guild Conspiracy. Hair braiding is my favorite; another is selling caskets; yet another recent example here.

I can't go so far, however, as to denounce licensing for the true professions: attorneys, physicians, accountants, etc. In those cases licensing by examination is an economically efficient signaling mechanism, and it facilitates access to the courts in cases of malpractice — which, no offense intended to cosmetologists, is far more important in a case of negligent lawyering or doctoring than in a case of negligent hair-braiding.

In any event, that's a debate for some future blogpost. It is axiomatic that the potential harm of "negligent tour guiding" is so minuscule that calls for "licensing" are of course preposterous and laughable.

For Discussion: Are the calls for tour guide licensing in Philadelphia and elsewhere the result of Kip's Law, the Guild Conspiracy, or both?

Pop Quiz: From the article —

Among the mistakes: Benjamin Franklin had 69 illegitimate children and homes were taxed based on how wide they were.

I can't speak to Benjamin Franklin, but a certain famous city did indeed once tax buildings based on how wide their facades were — with the unintended consequence of course that the buildings were subsequently built very narrow and very deep. Name the city. (Hint: Not New York, but close — in the historical sense of "close").

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*There is actually some, but not much, debate about whether Jonas Bronck was in fact Danish or Swedish, mainly deriving from the precedent question of whether the Faroe Islands, whence Bronck reportedly came, were properly considered part of Denmark or Norway (and therefore Sweden, which ruled Norway) at that time. But the consensus today is clearly that "Bronck was Danish."