WatchYea so? Do you know the requirements to get a license to cut hair? You have to attend an approved California School (or schooling and experience from another state) and take an exam. This is a form of protectionism, after all before the licensing requirements, how many people were injured getting there hair cut? How many got there eye poked out with sharp scissors or had there ear clipped off. Not many I wager, at worse they just got a bad hair cut. And God knows we have to prevent people from walking around with the shame of having a bad haircut.
What other industries protect there existing workers from the endless droves of unskilled workers looking to steal there jobs? There are over 100 jobs that have some type of licensing requirement, most that require schooling, hours of experience under a licensed professional and an state exam. While it's easy to understand why doctors have to meet a minimum level of competence, jobs like Librarian, Barber, Massage Therapist, and Taxidermists, there no obvious public safety hazard there except maybe getting a lousy hair cut, Books misfiled and a less than lifelike representation of Fido when you get him stuffed.
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This topic has been written about a bit more lately:
Economist:
http://www.economist.com/node/18678963
WSJ:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703445904576118030935929752.html
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I see no problem with requiring law school, but becoming an attorney should not be a 7 year ordeal. We should go back to the LLB (Bachelor of Laws) degree, in which you would start law school right out of high school. This is currently the system in Europe and Canada.
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I think there should be a low-requirement option for things that just don't require much expertise (simple wills, uncontested divorces, some legal research).
Speaking of Europe, when I lived in Germany I noticed that everything you could buy and pretty much every service in Germany was very high quality, and expensive too. That's nice if you want something high quality, but lots of times crap will do, especially if it's much cheaper.
So I was happy to get back to the US and at least have to the option to buy low-quality crap and get low-quality services if I didn't want to spend a lot.
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Patrick says
There have been suggestions that lawyers should be allowed to do limited engagements and other things in order to lower the price of legal services. The problem is that those "simple" things can quickly become complex things sometimes and might require a higher fee than if they had stayed simple.
HousingWatcher says
There are still states that allow you to apprentice to be a lawyer. NY is just one.
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There are only a few professions that can destroy a person's life by making a simple mistake. I think it is a good idea attorneys are held to such high standards and the Cliff Claven's of the world should be denied the right to provide legal counsel.
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The nice thing about everything being uniformly high quality and expensive is that you always get high quality.
The problem with cheap crap being available in the marketplace.... is that the premium option may be that same cheap crap with a shiny sticker.
At the same time, it's difficult to judge the quality of a product or service before you receive it and pay for it. Since it's hard to compare quality, but easy to compare pricing, it's eminently reasonable to only pay crap level pricing, and expect to get crap.
So, with crap out there, it becomes a race to the bottom to provide the cheapest crap. Finding cheapest crap is easy. Finding quality among overpriced crap becomes very hard.
The Germans are kind of on to something... I personally wouldn't mind decrapifying my life, if I could be assured it won't be recrapifyed.
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alex6654 says
That's what I see most of the time. Seriously.
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I'm all for licenses and certifications being an OPTION and not a REQUIREMENT for practicing ANY profession. This even extends to fields such as medicine. Require everybody to disclose whether they have a license or not and then allow individuals to decide what they need.
In the case of doctors, many people cannot afford health insurance and cannot afford to visit a doctor when sick... because it's too expensive! Let anybody do a check-up on such people and at least be able to recommend whether they really need to go to the hospital and provide some basic advice. Such a visit would be cheap, helpful, and accessible to many who would have not see anyone at all. (But it might not be good advice, you say! So??? I've gone to a $300 doctor's appointment that lasted 3 min's and I felt I had just been mugged it was so unhelpful. At least this would be cheap and the consumer could decide for himself.)
I'm a CPA by the way and getting certifications is basically jumping through a lot of hoops. It doesn't ensure high quality service at all.
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"I'm all for licenses and certifications being an OPTION and not a REQUIREMENT for practicing ANY profession. This even extends to fields such as medicine."
Is it crazy week on patrick.net? If it is, I did not get the memo...
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Patrick says
Can paralegals do some of those?
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Can't you also fill out the forms yourself for at least some of these things?