VinNews: The Rockland County Legislature approved amendments to the Home Improvement Law, dissolving the existing Home Improvement Licensing Board and shifting primary licensing authority to the Legislature itself…Under the new rules, the former licensing board will be reduced to an advisory role, losing its power to issue or revoke licenses. Licensing responsibilities will now fall under the Rockland County Legislature…

This is an interesting change and worth studying. In the Licensing Racket, which I reviewed for the WSJ, Rebecca Haw Allensworth emphasizes that occupational licensing boards put the fox in charge of the chickens:

Governments enact occupational-licensing laws but rarely handle regulation directly—there’s no Bureau of Hair Braiding. Instead, interpretation and enforcement are delegated to licensing boards, typically dominated by members of the profession. Occupational licensing is self-regulation. The outcome is predictable: Driven by self-interest, professional identity and culture, these boards consistently favor their own members over consumers.

Ms. Allensworth conducted exhaustive research for “The Licensing Racket,” spending hundreds of hours attending board meetings—often as the only nonboard member present. At the Tennessee board of alarm-system contractors, most of the complaints come from consumers who report the sort of issues that licensing is meant to prevent: poor installation, code violations, high-pressure sales tactics and exploitation of the elderly. But the board dismisses most of these complaints against its own members, and is far more aggressive in disciplining unlicensed handymen who occasionally install alarm systems. As Ms. Allensworth notes, “the board was ten times more likely to take action in a case alleging unlicensed practice than one complaining about service quality or safety.”

Moving regulation out of the hands of the regulated could be an improvement but there are also advantages to self-regulation. See my review for other reform possibilities.

Hat tip: Heshy.

The post Ending the Occupational Licensing Racket appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

The pontiff is right to warn against hatred and rash recourse to war—but his tendency toward a kind of functional pacifism marks a departure from older Christian wisdom.

With summer—and the World Cup—looming in Gotham, the mayor needs to show zero tolerance for roadway disorder.

The progressive defense of theft undermines the moral order.

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… is from page 71 of Thomas Sowell’s 1999 book, Barbarians Inside the Gates:

The automobile has been one of the great liberating forces of the twentieth century. It did more to reduce severe overcrowding, common in cities a century ago, than all the hand-wringing reformers put together. But, as the automobile enable people to spread out into the suburbs, to get some elbow room, the anointed began to wring their hands over what they now chose to call “urban sprawl.”

The post Quotation of the Day… appeared first on Cafe Hayek.

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I thank John Stossel and his team, including Kristin Tokarev, for inviting me to talk with him about Phil Gramm’s and my book, The Triumph of Economic Freedom.

The post Talking with John Stossel appeared first on Cafe Hayek.