Licensure: Encyclopedia II - Licensure - Restricting Entry

Licensure - Restricting Entry

Milton Friedman (1979) notes that licensure is widely used to restrict entry, particularly for occupations like medicine that have many individual practitioners dealing with a large number of individual customers (see for example the American Medical Association). The justification given by lobbyists for licensure laws is always to protect the consumer, but the real motivation behind licensure is to limit the supply of specific kinds of labor in order to raise their wages.

In Rhode Island, barbers, cosmetologists, arborists, massage therapists, landscape architects, chauffeurs, and even boxers are licensed.

"It is hard to regard altruistic concern for their customers as the primary motive behind their determined efforts to get legal power to decide who may be a plumber" (Friedman 1979).

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Restricting Entry", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki