Guest Post by Simon Black
Long ago in the Land of the Free, if you wanted to start a saloon, you rented a space and started serving booze.
You didn’t have to go through years of petitioning a bunch of bureaucrats for permits and licenses.
If you weren’t qualified or good enough at your job, your reputation would suffer and you’d go out of business.
This is the way it used to be for just about every industry and profession.
It wasn’t until 1889 that the US Supreme Court ruled in Dent v. West Virginia that states had the right to impose “reasonable” certifications or licenses for various professions.
At first, most states only licensed physicians, dentists, and lawyers.
In fact, by 1920, only about 30 occupations in the US required any sort of licensing.
By the 1950s, about 5% of US workers required a license to perform his/her job.
Today that number has risen to 30%, and climbing.
Some of our modern examples are completely insane.
According to the Brookings Institute, the state of Nevada requires 733 days of training and a $1,500 fee for a license… just to become a tour guide.
Over in Michigan, it takes 1,460 days of education to become an athletic trainer.
45 other states have license or certification requirements for athletic trainers. All fifty states have licenses for barbers and cosmetologists.
36 states require licenses for make-up artists. 34 states license milk samplers. And a mere 33 states license auctioneers.
These license requirements continue to grow, along with the overall level of rules and regulations in the Land of the Free.
Just this morning the US government published an extra 227 pages of rules, regulations, and proposals.
This happens every single business day in America.
Last week the government published over 2,000 pages of new rules, many of which border on absurdity.
To give you an idea, USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service proposed a rule about minimum and maximum diameters of potatoes that are sold in the State of Colorado.
Yes I’m serious.
This is the sort of madness that government bureaucrats churn out on a daily basis: more rules, more licenses.
Needless to say, the more of these rules they create, the more difficult it becomes for people and businesses to produce.
So it wasn’t exactly a big surprise when the US Labor Department released statistics a few days ago showing that, for the third straight quarter in a row, productivity in the Land of the Free declined.
In other words, US workers are producing less than they did before.
We haven’t seen this trend since 1979. And it’s the exact opposite of what’s supposed to happen.
As workers get more experienced and technologically advanced, productivity should grow.
But it’s not. US production is buried under countless pages of regulations and licensing requirements. And the trend has been negative for quite some time.
From 2000 through 2007, US productivity was about 2.6%.
Between 2007 and 2015, it shrank by half to about 1.3%, barely keeping up with population growth.
Now productivity is actually shrinking. America is going backward.
But there’s another side to this story.
Because while US economic growth has practically halted and productivity is shrinking, DEBT CONSUMPTION is up. Way up.
Americans are once again indebting themselves, often to buy useless things they don’t really need.
Auto loans and credit card debt are just two categories registering significant upticks.
(Not to be left out, the US government is leading with way with an absolute explosion in federal debt…)
So what we’re basically seeing now in the Land of the Free is people going into debt to consume more, while simultaneously producing less.
This is a pretty dangerous trend.
Human beings realized 10,000 years ago that if they wanted to survive, they had to produce more than they consumed.
During the Agricultural Revolution our early ancestors learned that, instead of constantly hunting for game, they could plant seeds in the ground and produce more food than they could possibly eat.
You and I wouldn’t be here if they hadn’t figured out this simple principle.
I call it the Universal Law of Prosperity, and it applies to governments, businesses, and individuals alike.
Any nation that fails to produce more than it consumes is in for serious trouble. And the government’s own data is showing that this is happening.
They create countless rules, regulations, and licensing requirements to make it more difficult to produce… and we can already see the results with (lack of) GDP growth.
Meanwhile they’ve slashed interest rates down to zero to incentivize people to consume.
It’s not hard to see where this trend is going.
So many rules for producing some eggs to sell to your neighbors that it cost far more than you could ever earn. Same for milk, cheese, meat, and some vegetables. So many protections for predators and criminals that they take all the potential profit.
When the water boils down all that is left are over zealous bureaucrats trying to justify their jobs on the local level. Money trickled down from the Federal handlers help to secure their “right” rules and regulations. Yep, in some cases paying the fine for your unlicensed endeavor is cheaper than the hoops want you to jump through. Hey, meet you at the hamster wheel?!
Personally, I think the solution is to go black market. Ignore the government. Especially the Federal Government.
While obviously not the best example, over half the states have legal or medical marijuana. This is in spite of the fact, that per Federal law, marijuana is a schedule 1 drug and is illegal.
It’s a bit of philosophical question, but is there really a difference, if there is one law that enslaves a man (or woman) versus one thousand little laws that effectively do the same thing?
But if gov’t agencies accomplish their original tasks, aren’t you concerned about the employees and management? In order for them to ‘live long and prosper’, they have to be creative and keep dreaming up new regulations, hopefully ones that require fees.
I am confident big brother has the public as the major concern for all their endeavors.
” ………. Nevada requires 733 days of training and a $1,500 fee for a license… just to become a tour guide.”
So?
You want public safety and order threatened by dangerously incompetent tour guides running amok?
The regulations are for creating jobs for regulators, and for limiting access and competition in various markets. Paying to get regulations passed is much easier than coming-up with a great idea or building a better mousetrap. Our country has way too much of this crap already, and I expect it to worsen if filthy hillary wins and turns what remains of America into her idea of a cuntry.
Yes Ignatious, the bureaucrats are salivating over the total control they have over the citizenry. They are the true “Confederacy of Dunces”! How is your valve treating you?
The valve is manageable, but I fear a may blow a gasket when I consider the vast quantity of maroons, dweebs, dunces and fools who will cast their votes for that piece of leftist filth named skankles.
What can I say, cankles is too good for that filthy thing.
And, I’m thinking about having a protest march, but am considering having my sheets washed before using them for making signage.
We have watering controls imposed due to drought, and the watering police patrol and look for offenders to report to the city.
There is actually a person in the city’s employ whose job it is to count trees. I can tell you we have 38,000 trees. The counter has discovered that about 1100 trees have died because their owners are not watering them, per instructions.
We are now being told to WATER THE TREES! WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH YOU PEOPLE? To sweeten the pot they let us have three days of water a week instead of two. So there must be water somewhere.
One can hope that a tree-loving bureaucrat will convince the city council that the 55% increase in water bills they have planned might have some unintended consequences.
Laws and regs are why small biz is dying. They create jobs. No small biz = no job growth.
We are screwed.
This is actually a good thing, because they are up against the limits of physical reality. People will happily put up with a few reasonable rules. As it is today, they will even put up with a litany of unreasonable rules if the payoff is worth it. But eventually, when you can’t get anything done and you can’t make any money, you ignore the rules. And when the rules are ignored en masse, the whole corrupt edifice crumbles. The Emperor has no clothes. And then we can get back to common sense, which has been continuously legislated away since the first congressmen took their seats.
Businesses, especially smaller ones, have become so ridiculously regulated, that it is much easier for your local government to drive you out of business no matter how innocuous, and successful, your business is, than it is for an employer to fire a non-performing employee.
It is all about interest groups carving out monopolies for themselves. Legalized theft . Call it what you want but it is fascism.
Indeed it is a screwed up world,
you need a license to cut hair, or trim toe nails,
but you don’t need a license to write s/w that goes into:
anti-lock brakes, pacemakers, and, pokemon go.
btw, pokemon go is nothing but a livestream feed of your phones camera to the nsa to test out facial recognition s/w in a crowd environment.