State Occupational Licensing Raises Costs And Stalls Innovation

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Posted by Jonathan Levin Friday, February 12, 2016 at 10:00am

 

Senator Mike Lee renews President Reagan’s call to get government out of the way.

 

“In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” That was Ronald Reagan in his first inaugural address, January 20, 1981, and in the years since it has become a rallying cry for small government conservatives.

Last week Senator Mike Lee (R. Utah) struck the same notes in an op-ed in Forbes. Lee writes:

 

Should only dentists be allowed to whiten people’s teeth? Or is this a service anyone should be allowed to offer?

 

This may sound like a silly question at first, but when the deeper question of occupational licensing is applied to the broader economy, it turns out that there are millions of jobs and hundreds of billions of dollars at stake.

 

But in a number of states throughout the country, dentists began losing teeth-whitening customers to non-dentists who had set up kiosks in shopping malls and were charging less money for the same teeth-whitening services.