What licensing is all about
Timothy Sandefur directs our attention to a Kansas proposal to ensure that professional licensees pay their taxes:
Kansas wants more taxes. So they’ll go after all professionals with licenses. Sounds fair enough—until you remember that licensing is supposedly in place to ensure that professionals are qualified, to protect the public from dangerous practices. It’s not supposed to raise money to give to people who don’t work.
On the other hand, one could make the point that if the licensees are going to use the power of the state to cartelize their industry (which is what professional licensing is really all about) it's not asking too much to ask the beneficiaries to feed the beast.
Posted by Chip on November 02, 2004 at 01:46 PMI too was confused by Tim's post (and we never disagree). The article was not describing using licensing fees as cash cows (i.e., to exploit the "price inelasticity of licenses"), but rather to posit the perfectly reasonable notion that if you don't pay your income taxes, then you should run the risk of losing the benefits of the state, including licenses. What's so "fascist" about that?
Unfortunately Tim doesn't have comments on his blog. His loss, your gain. ;-)
Posted by: KipEsquire at November 2, 2004 06:42 PM
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