Did you know the person who works at the nail salon down the street needs a license to do so? How about that the person cutting your hair needs 1500 hours of schooling to do so or that, in order to braid hair for money, you need 300 hours of instruction (in Illinois)? Laws vary state by state, but across the country we have restrictive licensing requirements for professions that are, to put it mildly, not dangerous should a practitioner commit a catastrophic error.
Imagine having gone through the trouble of achieving a license in one state and wanting to move to a different one only to discover that you would have to learn to comply with a whole new set of regulations. In some cases, you have to redo or supplement your already extensive training regardless of your existing work experience.
This is the system we currently live under. If our leaders want to help small business thrive, the first step should be to trim the thicket of regulation that blankets our country.
The status quo benefits almost no one but drives up prices for consumers while lowering quality of service. Competition suffers when needlessly high barriers to entry are erected around such professions. In many cases, compliance can be confusing and expensive. Economists rarely agree on anything, but there is nearly universal agreement that the current situation is terrible.
Nothing is being done about it.
It’s time to bring ourselves into the 21st century and make doing business easier. We should centralize licensure and drastically reduce it. One method of doing this is to place a sunset on all existing licensing requirements. That way, we can create new ones that will have to be justified. we can allow states to present reasons in front of commissions whose purpose is to veto nonessential requirements. Placing a sunset on current requirements would give them time to present their need (or not) while quickly cutting out unnecessary regulation.