A Stitch in Haste

A few days ago I blogged that I had essentially given up on trying to rationalize occupational licensing on economic efficiency grounds and was jumping on the more radical libertarian bandwagon that the "Politics of Pull" would almost always corrupt such potential benefits of a guild structure, at least in the lesser-skilled trades.

Yup:

In Louisiana, not just anyone can sell a bunch of pretty flowers. You have to have a license.

U.S. District Judge Frank Polozola ruled Wednesday that the state can keep its unique law requiring florists to pass a test and get a license to work on their own. Would-be florists had argued that the law unconstitutionally bars them from entering the occupation of their choice.

About half of all applicants fail the test, which includes a written exam and one in which they must create four floral arrangements in as many hours. Unlicensed "floral clerks" can only work in a shop which also has a licensed florist.

"There are few occupational licensing laws as crazy as this one in this country," said Clark Neily with the Institute for Justice, a libertarian nonprofit law firm in Washington, D.C. Neily said he will ask the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn the ruling.

Neily has argued that the question of who has floral talent should be left to the market: people whose arrangements are ugly would soon find themselves without customers.

Gee, that almost sounds too easy. Customers go to those businesses that actually provide good service, without regard for licenses. Someone should found an economic system on that principle. Maybe give it an impressive-sounding name, like "capitalism" or something.

Licensing for doctors -- obviously. Lawyers -- too important not to. Hairdressers -- conceivably, perhaps. But florists? Puh-leeze.

UPDATE: Related --

A bozo Brooklyn cop took a bite out of crime -- by busting the dad of a Girl Scout for "not being properly licensed" as the child sold cookies.
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The outrageous arrest unfolded at around 4:50 p.m. Saturday in front of 162 Bedford Ave. in Williamsburg, the family's old neighborhood. It's where Grace Marie Louis and her parents have been coming to sell the cookies since the girl was in first grade, her relatives said. The 13-year-old Scout, from Bethpage, L.I., had boxes that residents had already ordered and was delivering them and collecting money, relatives said. The teen also had extra boxes to sell in the family's van parked nearby.
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"That's when a police captain pulled up like Mighty Joe," Taras said. The irate grandma said the captain and another cop from the 94th Precinct hopped out of an unmarked car and approached the family. ...The officers proceeded to slap the flabbergasted dad with a summons, which reads, in part, "Defendant observed offering for sale cookies w/o being properly licensed."
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Apparently, the cop with the captain was upset, too. He did not want to ticket the dad but was strong-armed by his superior, police sources said.

Fortunately I get my Girl Scout Cookies from strictly legitimate sources.

Related Post:
The Politics of Pull -- A Cyberspace Case Study

Another libertarian underdog fight may get to the Supreme Court, if they're in the mood:

An Oklahoma regulation that requires the licensing of anyone who wants to sell caskets in the state should be buried six feet under, consumer groups are telling the Supreme Court this week.

At its conference Friday, the Court will consider whether to grant review in Powers v. Harris, No. 04-716, a case from the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upholding Oklahoma's Funeral Services Licensing Act.

The challenge comes after Kim Powers and Dennis Bridges began selling caskets over the Internet in 2001 through their Oklahoma corporation, Memorial Concepts Online, at prices below the funeral home market price. They sell caskets out of state and have forgone sales in Oklahoma because of the licensing law, which requires two years of college coursework and graduation from an accredited mortuary science program, two exams, and a one-year apprenticeship in a funeral home, during which the apprentice embalms at least 25 bodies.
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Although disagreeing with the regulation, [Chief Judge Deanell Reece] Tacha said it was not the court's role to strike the law. "While baseball may be the national pastime of the citizenry, dishing out special economic benefits to certain in-state industries remains the favored pastime of state and local governments," Tacha wrote. The court said Powers and Bridges had to turn to the legislature, not the courts, to change the law.

There's a circuit split over this issue, so it's possible that the Supreme Court will agree to hear the case, but my guess is that the prospects are slim. Unlike the recent case of Roper v. Simmons (the juvenile death penalty case), this Court seems to have found a new eagerness to defer to legislatures on all matters economic. For economic regulation, "rational basis review" continues to mean no review at all.

How exactly pumping a dead body full of embalming fluid makes someone more qualified to sell a casket defies all explanation. Making caskets more expensive by restricting supply, for the benefit of those who happen to have a license to sell them, requires no explanation at all -- it's the Politics of Pull.

When are you likely to be more susceptible to exploitation -- when you're grieving and sitting alone in a small room in a mortician's office or when you're strolling the aisles (or the web pages) of a variety of casket merchants? Just how defective can a casket be? How much "consumer protection" can possibly be required?

This law is an ideal test case. Which unfortunately still doesn't mean the prospects are good.

Meanwhile, here's the Institute for Justice website on the Oklahoma casket law and related licensure travesties.

FUN FACT: Until recently, morticians were unconditionally exempt from jury duty in New York State, under the rationalization that theirs was a "critical occupation." Talk about the Politics of Pull...

UPDATE: OpinionJournal has more.

Related Posts:
Licensing: A Thorny Bouquet
The Politics of Pull -- A Cyberspace Case Study

"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.
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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.
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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."

Posted without much comment, except to suggest that you read this in conjunction with my previous post:

A new law allowing only D.C. residents and businesses to register vehicles in the District has yet to be enforced because it could take up to 80 percent of the city's roughly 6,000 taxicabs off the streets.
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Lucinda Babers, acting director of the DMV, said the agency has some concerns about [compromise] legislation and that the taxicab industry wants to "continue the status quo."

"I can't blame them," she said at the hearing. "It's a sweetheart deal."

Same question as before: Is this D.C. cab licensing morass the result of Kip's Law, the Guild Conspiracy, or both?

...sightseeing tour?

[T]wo recent college graduates are rattling the genteel world of Washington tour guides.

Ben Hindman and Brody Davis are giving tours for free.
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Not entertained are the city's professional guides, who "really don't like us," says Hindman, 24, a Bostonian who found the inspiration for DC By Foot in Berlin, where he took a tour from a tips-only guide.
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Actually, says Tom Whitley, who handles marketing for the Guild of Professional Tour Guides of Washington, D.C., "it would be foolhardy for highly skilled guides to get into some kind of a fight with people trying to pick up tours out on the street. Let's just say that it's much more likely that a person who wants a qualified guide will go out and get a professional guide."

I took one of those Berlin tips-only tours back in January — and the guide (an Aussie expat) was fine if a bit too unaesthetically punk in his appearance. In any case, the Berlin company is a large, full-fledged enterprise that interviews and trains the guides and advertises the service on their behalf (I believe the guides pay the company a per-diem fee in exchange for access to the tourists from whom they earn the tips). It's an entirely reasonable business model that seems to work well (especially for the better guides) — there were, for example, over a hundred tourists waiting when I went (on a bitterly cold January day, incidentally — my guide said that 100 people was dismally low turnout for that time of year).

More interesting to me is the fact that there even is such a thing as a "Guild [sic] of Professional [sic] Tour Guides of Washington, D.C." First, "tour guide" is not a profession, but merely an occupation — just as "journalist" is not a "profession" but merely an occupation. Second, I'm not sure that tour guides need a "guild" — which used to mean a limited-entry oligopoly structure sanctioned by the government.

Surely this "guild" isn't that kind of guild. No one would dare suggest that it is a proper function of government to establish a "tour guide guild" with legally enforced barriers to enrtry, right? No one would dare suggest that public health or safety are so threatened by dangerous tour guides that the government should start regulating the industry, with licensure and registrations fees and bans on tips-only business models, right?

Right?