This is exactly what I’ve been trying to say for some time now. Yglesias notes that the state is often used as a tool for the rich and powerful and entrenched at the expense of the poor and disenfranchised but that it still can be used to achieve good ends. This is what I was driving at with beer deregulation, or limiting the state’s power to coerce, surveil, etc. while still using government to enforce important safety regulations. Here’s Matt:
A colleague mentioned to me the other day that I’m “pretty conservative” on some state and local government issues, with reference to some recent posts on occupational licensing. Someone on twitter asked if I’m trying to score a date with a Cato staffer. I’m not. And I’m not. And I think that whole framing represents a bad way of understanding the whole situation.
I think it’s pretty clear that, as a historical matter of fact, the main thing “the state” has been used to do is to help the wealthy and powerful further enrich and entrench themselves. Think Pharaoh and his pyramids. Or more generally the fancy houses of European nobility, the plantations of Old South slaveowners, or Imelda Marcos’ shoes. The “left-wing” position is to be against this stuff—to be on the side of the people and against the forces of privilege. It’s true that some useful egalitarian activism over the past 150 years has consisted of trying to get the state to take affirmative steps to help people—social insurance, the welfare state, infrastructure, schools—but dismantling efforts to use the state to help the privileged has always been on the agenda. Don’t think to yourself “we need to regulate carbon emissions therefore regulation is good therefore regulation of barbers is good.” Think to yourself “we can’t let the privileged trample all over everyone, therefore we need to regulate carbon emissions and we need to break the dentists’ cartel.”
One thing I’ve realized over the past few months is that liberalism is a pretty big tent. This in stark contrast to contemporary conservatism which is, if anything, a few small embattled tents each trying to out-crazy the other. I’ve also realized, perhaps a little late, that a lot of people on the left think pretty much like Matt does here – a lot of people don’t but you’re not tossed out of the movement for it (not yet anyways). On the right plenty of people think that regulation can hurt small interests while benefiting big corporations, but they also think that any move toward government assistance in healthcare is socialism, any tax hike is tantamount to totalitarianism and that anyone who strays too far fromt he fold is a RINO or a closet liberal, etc. etc. ad nauseum.
Now, I think Matt takes this too far to some degree. The ‘state’ certainly has been used for great evil for many thousands of years, but democracy and liberalism helped create a much more limited state than anything previously. The sorts of bad things the modern liberal state creates are typically not on a par with the Egyptians. His central thesis, however, still holds. The state benefits the privileged classes the most, sometimes at the expense of the poor and working class. We should work to limit government where it benefits the powerful, and work to expand government where it benefits the least powerful, i.e. work to get government out of the economy and into the business of providing safety nets, which is essentially the balance they’ve struck in Northern Europe (hardly a bastion of socialism, but certainly a bastion of welfare liberalism where free markets and generous safety nets work together to create strong, stable economies).
Which brings me back to barbers: a lot of people pointed out that barbers/hair stylists work with dangerous chemicals, can cause some serious damage and so forth. Well, lots of people working with food face similar problems. Food poisoning is a much more likely health risk than hair dye gone wrong. But a food handlers permit is something you can take a test for, pay a small license fee, and then work on the job to gain experience. Why can’t a similar licensing process be used for hair styling? Likewise, first aid and CPR training require one day of instruction (typically a few hours each) and renewal every year for CPR and every three years for first aid. Again – why not something like this for hair stylists to cover the basic safety issues involved with their job? Then you can have them learn the rest of their trade at work (or at home!). If they want extra credentials to get a leg up in the job market or just to learn more about the trade, they could take optional courses at a community college. As it stands, the only ones profiting off current hair stylist regulations are the beauty schools and the competition.
Neither myself nor Matt, as far as I can tell, are suggesting that no licensing should be required for dental hygienists or barbers – only that the licensing should fit the job and should provide a reasonable test of a person’s ability to practice that job safely – not create unreasonable barriers to getting that job in the first place. If you aren’t going to shave with a straight razor you shouldn’t have to be licensed to shave with a straight razor. If you need to learn about hair dye safety then a simple safety course should suffice rather than nine months and twelve thousand dollars sunk into beauty school. A basic teeth cleaning could be performed by a trained hygienist without the supervision of a dentist because the dentist doesn’t actually do anything at a teeth cleaning anyways except charge the customer a fee.
These are issues which effect poor and working class people the most, both on the consumer side (cost of dental work) and on the provider side (cost of beauty school). However you look at it, improving how regulation works in this country, making rules more fair and equitable, and lowering the barrier to entry especially in the service economy are things that liberals should care about a lot. I’m anti-corporatist as much as anyone out there, but what worries me most isn’t the Corporations or the Government but rather collusion between the two. Whether that’s privatized prisons or government-backed medical cartels, these are hugely regressive issues that hurt the poor and working class the most.
For instance, who on earth could possibly benefit from this new licensing requirement for bloggers that the city of Philadelphia is imposing? For shame, Philly. For shame.
Quiddity
If we had a damn good safety net (health, unemployment, retirement) then I’d bet a lot of liberals would be fine with a more libertarian approach to lots of things. I know I would. Perhaps that explains E.D.Kain’s observation that liberalism is a big tent. The culture wars are a mixed bag (gun control has faded, but on the other hand gay rights are expanding) and – at least nowadays – the focus has now turned to the 30 years of wage stagnation, and not sharing of productivity gains, by just about everybody. When people align on economic issues, like they did during the Depression, many other issues fade in significance. That’s pretty much where we are today.
DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective
“Free markets” is a slogan, not an idea.
What about our current markets is “not free” in your view? What would make them freer? What is the idea behind the boilerplate blogspeak?
DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective
If private/public connections in health insurance is not to your liking, then what is the alternative? No healthcare reform and “free market” access only for rich people?
Or maybe single payer is more to your liking? Again, what is the idea you are promoting?
I must have missed a meeting. Are you suggesting that oversight, regulation and restraint on unregulated markets, especially in a field like healthcare, is somehow bad for poor people? Worse than unfettered for-profit health insurance, which jacks costs and leaves millions shit out of luck?
Can you be clear please?
Ecks
so our friendly sane conservative actually turns out to be a liberal after all… Go figure :)
(yeah yeah yeah, in the modern American context where “conservative” is defined as “myopically insane tribalist, and/or cocksure psychopath” and “liberal” is defined as “everyone else” – If there were more liberals we could divide them back up into the liberal and conservative ones the way it used to be, but until then the terms have been kidnapped by Fox). Gaad bless muhrka.
freelancer (itouch)
If this was actually the case, then not one modern republican would win their race this year. Unforunately for us, this is not the case, and even worse, the GOP’s greatest talent is distraction.
E.D. Kain
@DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective: Saying that ‘free markets is a slogan not an idea’ is just as much a slogan. Free markets mean fewer government interventions into the marketplace; fewer protectionist rules, fewer stupid regulations as per above; fewer tariffs and subsidies on goods. You can call that a ‘slogan’ rather than an idea, but I remain convinced that all that meddling leads to plenty of harm that could otherwise be avoided. I’m all for better safety nets like healthcare for all, etc.
E.D. Kain
@Ecks: Like I’ve said in previous posts, I’m more of a free market liberal (classical liberal?) than a conservative though I do have my more conservative moments.
greginak
Good stuff Eric. I think the problem is that while i think many/most lib’s would be fine moving in the direction you suggest it is just not a driving force. It’s a good idea, but not one that has a strong constituency on the left. The people who have a constant hard on for deregulation, libertarians, are so stuck in their own dogma and absolutism about markets that they can’t seem to work together with Dem’s to start to move forward on this. This is the kind of place that a liberlatarian (sp?) alliance could work but it will take years to work to build that kind of coalition.
I would also suggest the likely benefits of the dereg you propose are oversold. It might be nice to get a quick teeth cleaning at the mall but there are major capital costs in setting up a practice. In any case while a cheepo cleaning is a good thing, its also a lot more convenient to go to one practice for all the sadism…i mean dentistry. And i am bald so the entire barber/hairdresser thing is close to sci-fi to me.
E.D. Kain
@Quiddity:
Exactly! That’s basically what a lot of northern European countries have done, actually.
Yutsano
ED, I gotta call big false equivalency alert here. You don’t learn how to cook in a food handler’s class. You learn how to handle food safely, which is an important but small part of being an actual food handler. And if you can learn to simply cook while on the job, what is the point of culinary school? Not all cooking jobs involve learning how to flip a burger at McDonalds. Also, honing the skills necessary to cut hair properly takes more than just training. It takes time and practice, which is why cosmetology school is so lengthy. By the time you finish you not only know how to style hair and handle dyeing chemicals properly, you also have developed the actual physical tools necessary to do the job competently. I think that is what you’re not understanding here: beauty school may be considered a low class education, but it doesn’t mean just any old schlub can do it.
DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective
It’s a fact. And you are dead wrong, and that is a particularly stupid thing to say.
As usual you are talking apples to the oranges of reality. I know what fucking free markets mean. But I also know that quite a long period of so-called free market healthcare has left us with overpriced care that is largely unavailable to millions. SO WHAT IS THE REMEDY? Can you actually propose an idea, or are you just up to typing talking pointlets?
You are all for better safety nets? Really? Then how would you provide for them?
E.D. Kain
@Yutsano: You miss the point. You don’t need culinary school to be a cook; you do need beauty school to be a hair stylist. I think that’s wrong. You should be able to get a hair safety permit the same as you get a food handlers permit. And if you want more training, kudos to you. People can learn on the job in either profession and/or at home.
Ecks
@E.D. Kain: I haven’t been following at all closely for the past few days, so forgive me if this is now a widespread sentiment, but welcome to free exchange in the comment section. Glad to see you coming in here and mixing it up with us :)
E.D. Kain
@DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective: I’m loathe to engage anyone so obviously stuck in their ways, but I’ll try.
Believing that free markets are undeniably good does not mean one must believe they are suited to fix All Problems. Like healthcare. Even the most ‘free market’ systems have government backing – the Netherlands, for instance.
How would I provide better safety nets? Well, for one I’d make healthcare independent of employment. If you lost your job, your benefits wouldn’t cease to exist. I’d make insurance companies much more competitive by breaking up regional monopolies and allowing for competition across state lines and make health insurance regulation federal. I’d include some combination of health subsidies (or vouchers) based on income to purchase health insurance, and include a baseline which would make insurance free except for copays beneath a certain income level (poverty line? 150% of poverty line?) which would immediately kick in if you lost your income. I would bundle Medicaid, Medicare and the new healthcare bill. Lots more ways to increase efficiency and cut costs but I’ll write a post about that sometime instead of boring you here.
Yutsano
And you’re missing my point. Knowing how to handle hair safely doesn’t make you qualified to cut someone’s hair professionally. There is much more to the profession than just knowing how not to fry someone’s scalp. And learning to be a cook anywhere but a fast food joint takes anywhere from three to six weeks, and even then you’re relegated to the most menial duties until you demonstrate further competencies. Neither of these skills happens in a one day course.
@E.D. Kain: I seem to be more aware of your time constraints than others, and I also enjoy interacting with you. Hopefully the new one is sleeping through the night.
E.D. Kain
@Ecks: I do my best when I can. Time permitting. Thanks!
E.D. Kain
@Yutsano: So why can’t that model work in hair styling/cutting? If it works in food and any innumerable other industries, why must hair stylists be forced to take a different, more lengthy and expensive path? Why can’t they work as assistant or apprentice barbers first? Learn on the job and save lots of money?
NobodySpecial
@E.D. Kain: And indeed people do, which is why kids all over the country get picked on for having their hair cut with the aid of a plastic bowl.
Won’t you think of the children?
EDIT – and seriously, the reason there’s no apprenticeship for barbers is because they had better get it right the first time, or there’s no repeat business. They depend much more on word-of-mouth, and on the job training would kill that.
Joey Maloney
@E.D. Kain: Maybe this is a chicken-and-egg thing, but there doesn’t seem to be an apprenticeship route and progression in cosmetology the same way there is in cooking.
In a restaurant you start out peeling potatoes, do that for a few months, then you start making salads, then sauces, then cooking meat…or whatever. You could be following that path for years at different restaurants under increasingly prestigious chefs de cuisine before you are skilled enough to be in charge of a kitchen yourself.
But when it comes to cutting hair I don’t see how a similar apprenticeship would work. A botched salad goes in the trash. Where does a botched haircut go?
Also, a commercial kitchen is a large enough undertaking that there are enough people to provide supervision for apprentices and (NPI) eat their mistakes without hurting the bottom line too much. How would that work in a typical 3 or 6 or 10-chair beauty shop?
Point being, it seems to me that you need cosmetology schools in a way that you don’t necessarily need culinary schools.
roshan
1) Food Handlers,
2) Hair Stylists,
3) First Aid / CPR Personnel.
Which one of the above 3 is not like the other?
#2, Hair Stylists. It’s an occupation, while the other two are not occupations. Food handling and first aid/CPR are just one functions (doesn’t mean they are unimportant) of two (or many) other occupation(s).
Having a hair safety permit (is there such a thing?) doesn’t give anyone any skill in performing hair styling, just how to handle chemicals to be used in the process.
Yutsano
@NobodySpecial: This. If I go to get my hair cut, I expect the job to be done professionally and cleanly and most of all quickly. If I wanted it to take twice as long with a hanger-on checking the work the whole time I’d go to a beauty school and volunteer my locks there. The fact that I should do that anyway due to my hair type is not the point.
DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective
Well then you should be forming policy for progressive healthcare reform. Why are you wasting your time pretending to pimp something called free markets?
Again I ask, how do you, for example, separate HCI from employment, without either a matrix of public/private resources, which will be structured and interdependent, or else single payer? How do you even START to address these issues without requiring the healthy to participate in the insurance scheme and run into the same political headwinds that our current HCR scheme is running into?
Rather than make flighty and high sounding slogans out of serious political issues, maybe you could take the extra time to explain what the hell you are actually advocating and how it would work?
Just a goddam suggestion ED.
DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective
Food handling is not cooking, any more than shampoo handling is hairdressing.
Food handling is about a day’s worth of training in food safety basics. Real cooking (not fry cooking) is something that takes long periods of training and apprenticeship.
Comparing that to food handling is just bone stupid.
DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective
@E.D. Kain:
You are just fucking with this now, ED. You clearly have no idea what the hell you are talking about.
roshan
Regarding health care, just study these systems already in place around the five capitalist countries in the world and adapt them here.
Just look at Switzerland, it’s expensive, but far less than the current US system, and there is some room too to make profits.
Maybe asking to adapt the above systems here is too much to ask, but can studying them for information hurt anyone?
DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective
You know what, John Cole? Fuck you and your “be nice to the new guy” bullshit.
This asshole has no idea on earth what he is talking about and he is an insult to the intelligence of anyone who takes these things seriously. If this is your idea of what you think your blog should be, then fuck it, and you.
Fucking “food handling” as a placeholder for the training of cooks and chefs? Are you fucking kidding me?
New slogan for that four star restaurant down the road: Our cooks hardly ever kill anybody! Honest!
Joey Maloney
@DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective: I wonder if food handling is an issue at your house today, DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective? It appears to me that the amount of urine in your bowl of breakfast cereal exceeds federal guidelines.
LikeableInMyOwnWay
Not really, Joey. I got my certificate in 1964. I hardly ever kill people with my food any more. Oh sure, it happens, but nobody’s perfect, right?
Besides, have we really looked at the possible positive effects of food poisoning?
Ecks
Look I claim no expertise in cosmetology, but what ED is saying really isn’t so hard:
How much government regulation is required for hair cutting? It has to cover the basic safety issues (torts aren’t a very good way of making sure nobody gets chemical burns), but that only takes a basic license equivalent to a food-handling one.
So then nobody wants a crappy haircut, but is the government really required to regulate THAT part? I mean, if you do get a crappy haircut your life isn’t over, it grows back, and that salon is never seeing you or anyone you know ever again. That means a salon owner is likely to demand some sort of credential or school learnin’ from potential employee, unless they are very confident that they have taught them well enough on their own – but if that is left as a call for the individual salon owner, what is the worst that can happen? A few people get bad haircuts for a while (repaired up as best they can be), and the crappy salons go out of business all of their own.
On one level it’s a silly debate, because the free market, left to its own devices (with basic safety forced upon it, naturlich) is going to operate much like the existing gov enforced regime does anyway, so very little would actually change. But ED’s point here doesn’t seem prima facie crazy.
roshan
Hey Dick, we can’t do this to him now, he is one of our own, we can’t and won’t throw him overboard. This is just a discussion and everyone can learn and come up, and we got many clicks to cover. So calm down, he ain’t going anywhere and even if he does, I bet he will call himself a liberal down the road anyways.
In other words, don’t be a dick.
Joey Maloney
@LikeableInMyOwnWay:
Now there’s something I hadn’t considered. People pay an awful lot to (unlicensed) spa and “curative” practitioners for things that aren’t all that dissimilar.
“I ate at your restaurant and I’ve been puking my guts out for the last week!” “Really? Thanks for letting us know! We’ll charge your credit card another $300 for the upper-GI cleansing!”
Yutsano
@Ecks:
Or a salon owner washes their hands of a total idiot…and that total idiot goes to another salon and burns the scalp of a child. Chemical burns suck, they take a very long time to heal and some can cause permanent scarring. Let’s face it: there are things in salons you do NOT want handled by a complete amateur. I’d rather know the person who has a blade to my head has some independent acknowledgment of what they are doing (which is what a license is) rather than just trust the damn invisible hand and pay the consequences for months (not all people are as lucky to have fast growing hair like me) or even worse permanent damage requiring artificial hair replacement. The reason we do licensing in the first place is because you can’t always trust everyone to do the right thing.
@roshan:
Spoken like a true optimist. :)
asiangrrlMN
@Yutsano: I have to agree here. I used to go to a haircutting school, and the results were very uneven. The last time, I went in for a perm (don’t judge me!) that took six hours and didn’t take. I had to go in the next day to get it ‘fixed’, and yeah, no. Plus, there are a lot of dangerous chemicals involved in many aspects of hair care that I WOULD NOT want someone to experiment with on me.
I can see cutting down on some of the school requirements such as if you’re going to do strictly haircuts, you may not have to learn about perming chemicals and such, but I would be very uneasy with doing it on a learn-as-you-go basis. It’s not enough to say, well, people don’t have to go there. With so many choices, there has to be some basic standards that apply across the board or else it’ll be buyers beware.
ETA: Or, what Yutsy said right above me. He was much more eloquent.
silentbeep
I am sympathetic to less regulation within cosmetology. I am. If there is a salon that offers nothing but hair cutting, I could see your point of view. With Matt, I could see his point of view regarding old school barbershops, sure. I just want to point out though, that people’s concerns are not just about hairdye. When we are talking about waxing, facials, pedicures, manicures, etc all the services offered in many salons nowadays, safety concerns are not petty. In this day in age of infection increasingly resistant to anti-biotics, this is something to consider, and not just brush aside.
I cited this about at Matt’s page, and I’m gonna cite this article here:
I suggest this article from 2005
http://www.nailsmag.com/feature.aspx?fid=75&ft=2
key paragraph:
—
Paula Abdul was once again in the spotlight, only this time it was because of an infection she contracted at a high-end salon and not for her “American Idol” antics. Abdul testified at a California Senate committee that she contracted a staph infection in her thumb from an unsanitary manicure she received at a California salon last year.
“This horrific and debilitating condition was left under my thumbnail as a direct result of the salon using non-sanitized instruments,” said Abdul. “This type of infection has caused not only me, but thousands of women the expense of medical attention, loss of wages, loss of sleep, traumatic medical procedures, fear of returning to nail salons, and in my case and many others, emergency surgeries.”
—–
As a side note: from my own ultra girly-girl, straight female perspective: getting a botched haircut can be really damn emotionally distressing. It’s not good enough to just be told “oh it will grow back!” it doesn’t make it any better, IMHO. I want a professional, full trained person handling my hair. Having someone practice on me as an apprenticeship, is frankly, unacceptable. The learning curve for doing good hair is too steep, we are talking a lot of bad haircuts before someone can get potentially good. Grooming especially for women, is a big deal, and we are judged professionally on appearance (as everyone is, but it’s especially pertinent for women’s hairstyles).
Additonally, the cost of beauty school: I don’t see the cost as being especially prohibitive, it’s nowhere even remotely close to the cost of a college degree. Essentially, beauty school is another form of vocational education. It does not take that long (I know someone who went to beauty school for less than a year) and her tuition cost the equivalent of one year of undergrad at a state school, not bad. She didn’t have the money up front, but she took out a loan which is small enough to pay over the course of several years.
Yutsano
@asiangrrlMN: Stop hon I’m blushing. :)
But yeah, I’m standing behind my false equivalence charge, even if this:
is a very intriguing thesis on its own. I really want ED to defend his position beyond “I don’t see the necessity” but we may not get that because I’m thinking a wee one woke up.
And a little something for Bnut, just because I can. I know he’s long dead to the world though. And maybe he’s in this vid too.
asiangrrlMN
@Yutsano: Don’t follow the red herring! Just don’t do it!
Back on subject, I don’t get my hair cut any more because it’s so long. I just trim the ends every couple of months.
@Yutsano: OK, that’s hilarious/horrifying.
Ecks
@Yutsano:
All very true, except if you’d actually read my original post you would have spotted the bit where I said (and ED said) you need licensing to cover the health damaging parts. If someone is going to work in a salon they have to be certified that they know how not to maim or permanently damage people. Just like a cook has to bottom-line know how to not make you sick.
Everyone agrees on that part. Loudly and publicly and frequently.
The point of divergence comes when we consider the harm that comes when some incompetent messes up the aesthetic elements of your hair. Is the government required to protect people from this harm? Keeping in mind that it’s a very temporary and not health-damaging type of harm that people are perfectly capable of being enraged and retaliating for on their own…
You know what, rather than I retype my post, why don’t you just go back and read the original one, except processing the words this time.
Sorry to be so snarky, but that was a pretty blatant case of shooting totally wild.
silentbeep
@E.D.
Do you have any statistics or evidence about the problems of going to beauty school? Do you have any stats to show that is exorbitantly cost prohibitive? Or time prohibitive?
I am really failing to see the problem with going to vocational school for only 9 months. If you can provide some stats about how beauty school affects cosmetelogists or salons in a negative way, please provide them.
Pseudonym
Ok, so maybe on-the-job training for barbers and cosmetologists isn’t that great of an idea. I still see a lot of merit in the argument that licensing cosmetologists is not a particularly useful function of government. One big difference between food safety/CPR licensing and haircutter licensing is that it’s a lot more difficult for an average citizen to judge the salmonella content of a hamburger or the competence of a lifeguard than it is to judge the aftermath of a bad haircut. The government also isn’t licensing food preparers in order to safeguard the taste of restaurant meals; individuals are perfectly capable of making those decisions themselves, and involving the government would not add any benefit. It’s like Obama said about wars: I’m not opposed to all government intervention, only stupid government intervention.
Ecks
right, sure. And if you buy a new dress and wear it out in public and it rips at the seams and leaves you stranded nearly nekkid in an awkward place, that would also be extremely emotionally distressing, right? But you’re not advocating for a government program to test the tensile strength of all garment seams are you?
If you buy an expensive dress and it rips apart on you, you’re never buying that brand again, and you’re bad mouthing it to all your friends, and they are probably passing along that bad mouthing, and those expensive dresses don’t get sold much longer. Of course, if you buy a really cheap dress from a fly-by-night operation then your bad-mouthing might be less effective, but then that’s why you bought the expensive one in the first place isn’t it – because you know that the high-end dress maker has something really big to lose if the product doesn’t work, so you can put more faith in it.
All of that goes for hair too. You need to be assured that any hair dresser will be physically safe and not give you a horrible infection. And if a bad hair cut would distress you, then you’re going to pay more for one at a salon that would be badly hurt by your negative word of mouth if they kack it up. If you don’t care you might try a cheaper fly-by-night and take your chances. Either way, no government intervention required.
Yutsano
@Ecks: Maybe you should read something I wrote earlier:
The separation of one from the other is nonsensical. And pretending it is totally belies the reality of the cosmetology profession. And yeah, there is a larger danger in handing someone pair of scissors than just a bad haircut. The possibility of maiming and other permanent damage is also there. So the state does have a vested interest in protecting the consumer from a potential harm.
I’m also realizing I come from a state with a relatively high level of regulation, and maybe that is coloring my perceptions. I stand by what I say though: I’m not worried about a bad job at a hair salon. I’m worried about a human handling dangerous tools and chemicals. I want independent assurance that person knows what the fuck they’re doing. If that makes me a sociaIist, then I wear that fucking badge with honor.
asiangrrlMN
What the fuck, WP? Seriously. One more time. I hate you with the intensity of a thousand suns.
Basic schooling info. It does not seem unreasonable to me.
wwwDOTbeautyschoolsdirectoryDOTcom/faq/
Ecks
@Yutsano:
look dude, we agree. If there is a risk of someone being physically harmed by sharp objects or dangerous chemicals, then that part needs regulating so that we can be assured of basic safety.
I agree on that, you agree on that, ED agrees on that, everyone does. But that level of safety does not require a year (or whatever) of cosmetology school. It just requires someone to pass some basic test showing that they know how not to harm people.
The difference between us is that you are insisting that the government ALSO, ON TOP OF, ABOVE AND BEYOND SAFETY CONCERNS AAALLLSSOOO should enforce standards of competence at providing aesthetically pleasing hair cuts. And while, believe me, we’re all in favor of good hair cuts, this seems like something the market can sort out on its own without government intervention. See Pseudonym’s post @38, which nails this completely, utterly, and succinctly.
Edit: and now I have to go to bed. To you with failing hands I throw, yadda yadda, Good night all.
asiangrrlMN
@Ecks: Really? You think a year is too much? As I said, I’ve been to a haircutting school, and it was brutal. These were not first-year students, either. If we were to abolish schooling for cosmetologists, then I would demand that every hair-dressing place note exactly how much experience they have and in what. Asian hair is the hardest hair to cut, and I’ve had enough of my fair share to know that I would not want to go to someone who has never cut Asian hair before. This is not an aesthetic matter–or rather, it is, but it’s one that can be trained. Yes. I want to know that the hairdresser I frequent at least has the minimum training needed to cut my hair. I really don’t think that’s too much to ask.
@Yutsano: Once again, you said pretty much the same thing I did, only moar better. Sigh.
silentbeep
@Ecks:
That comment you are citing, is in support of actually going to beauty school, which may or may not have to do with government regulation.
What I’m seeing here, is that E.D. is talking about two different things, that are not necessarily related 1) government regulation of cosmetology 2) beauty school.
I am sympathetic to lowering regulation or making it easier for people to get a license. I’d like to hear more about this.
However, what I am not sympathetic to, is the idea that beauty school is not needed or iis ncidental to becoming a professional beautician. I could see a situation where the government loosens regulation dramatically, and isn’t involved in beauty school at all. However, I think beauty school would still valuable and still worth attenting and paying for, for it’s own professonal sakem even if the government were to get out of beauty school business.
To attract clients that really think beautician’s services are worthwhile, going to beauty school will still be an attractive option for beauticians. I know personally, if I had a choice between going to a hairstylist that has no professional training, and one that has extensive training, I’d go to the educated stylist – this does not have to involve the government per se.
So my comment was actually in support of beauty school, not necessarily in support of keeping the status quo of government regulation. I do agree with E.D. there needs to be at least some safety regulation, but I’m waiting to see those statistics I asked for. Maybe I can be persuaded? At this point thought, not likely lol
Yutsano
@Ecks:
No, as a matter of fact I did not say that. Nothing I have said has had a single bit of lick to do with aesthetics. You’re just trying to put words in my mouth to try and argue a point I’m not even making. That is why you can sue over a bad haircut, and why you can call the licensing board if you’re physically harmed. The fact that I expect competence as well as knowledge seems to be escaping you. But as you’re adjourning I’ll let it drop. Thanks for at least rationally discussing the matter.
@asiangrrlMN: And this. Now ED needs to get back here cause he’s got some splainin to do.
asiangrrlMN
@Yutsano: And now we’re citing each other. Ha!
Yutsano
@asiangrrlMN: You’ll have to forgive me for thinking this is not a negative. It’s not like we haven’t mind melded before.
Pseudonym
One issue I’ve heard come up in the past, though I’m not at all familiar with it myself, is that of African-American women who provide hair-braiding services having their businesses shut down by local governments because they lack the proper licenses for cosmetology. This seems like a very counterproductive use of government resources to me. I don’t think their work involves any dangerous chemicals, or even any risk of medium-term unfixable aesthetic problems, but the fact that certain people don’t have access to the kind of capital required to spend a year in school rather than working is being used to shut them out of a line of business for no benefit to the consumer.
JamesC
You know what’s the really big difference between cooking and haircutting?
When you screw up food, it gets minced up and served anyhow, and nobody can tell the difference. I apprenticed at a Chinese food place for a while, and believe me – learnin’ the wok is Not Freaking Easy. Nor learnin’ how to properly handle a cleaver when you’re working with commercial quantities of deboned thigh. But when the new kid screws up, you just chop it finer, fry it up, and mix with veggies. And if he nicks himself and blood splatters all over it (and it’s a kitchen – you’ll damn well nick yourself if you’re not a lazy bastard) you wash it up and get back to business.
Food’s easy. The chemicals involved are fairly mild, and the exposure factor’s readily mitigated by a nice dousing of blisteringly-hot oil, be it immersion in it, or merely greasing the bottom of the pan. And the history and tradition of food has gone a long, long, INCREDIBLY long ways towards learning how to deal with odds, ends, scrapings and mistakes. And the gross majority of the risk factor is on part of the practitioner, not the customer – the worst the customer should usually get is a mild scalding of the roof of his or her mouth from a hot bowl of soup. You can’t stay that about chemically-based cosmetics.
Why are we comparing apples and oranges again?
Yutsano
@Pseudonym:
You would be incorrect. In fact, African-American hair requires more product, some of it rather harsh, in order to be braided properly. So the fact that those independent operations were closed isn’t surprising to me.
And you aim for the wrong solution as well. In fact, loosening up loans and grants for this exact sort of small business encouraging enterprise is a very good role for the government. That whole teach a man to fish thing and all that.
@JamesC: Because our esteemed FPer went for that comparison. And I agree with you they are two totally separate entities in their requirements and skill sets.
morzer
I am curious about one thing, ED Kain, which is how you see such issues as food labeling, and regulation of food quality and sourcing. To me it seems reasonable that businesses supplying food should be required to be transparent about its content, and where the content comes from, as well as regulated to ensure that the food is produced hygienically. I am thinking here about the ground beef scandal, where we discovered that “ground beef” is often a mixture of very dubious materials, can often not be traced back adequately to its source, and has, potentially, the power to paralyze and possibly kill the consumer because of the almost total lack of oversight of the industry. How would you see clear, precise food labeling and requirements for transparency about sourcing, as well as regulations mandating hygienic production? My sense is that these need not interfere with a free market, simply require that said market be in decent quality food and enable citizens to achieve security, as well as recompense if the food producer supplies them with a bad product.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
One of my sisters is a cosmetologist, training hard for it over two years at a community college and has been doing it for twenty years now. Hair dye is the least of it, they handle all kinds of toxic chemicals (bleaches, perms, relaxers and more) and they need to know proper use, interactions, handling, emergency treatment and disposal. This is not knowledge that is casually imparted in an as-you-go manner while working, you need specific training that focuses on the various facets of the job and how they relate to each other.
Cutting hair is the least of it. Being ugly for a short time is nothing compared to being blinded or chemically burned. You might be comfortable with having people who are casually trained in cosmetology work on you or someone in your family, but I am not. I’ll pay for the licensed and trained professional.
Or rather my wife and our daughter will, I have a pony tail that only needs trimming once in a while. :)
Yutsano
@DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal):
You DFH you. :) But yeah I’m seeing a lot of misunderstanding on the anti-regulation side of just what is required to be a cosmetologist.
morzer
@JamesC:
Here I would have to disagree with you. It’s perfectly true that some cooks get burned, cut themselves, sometimes inhale unhealthy amounts of smoke etc. On the other hand, if food is prepared in an unhygienic way, or if the basic materials are tainted, customers can become seriously sick and even, in admittedly rare cases, die.
Yutsano
@morzer: One of the biggest leaps we made as a country is in the area of food safety, especially in restaurants. And nowadays we have even more and deadlier bugs than when The Jungle was written. We still have gaps, but those gaps used to be the norm.
morzer
@DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal):
I think you’ve raised an important point, namely that men and women tend to have rather different requirements in hair styling and, as a result, are likely to see the process and expected outcome differently. In my own case, I like my hair short, even shaved, although not to Carville-esque gleaming baldness. My wife does this for me, using a fairly cheap clipper, and I am happy with the results and grateful for her skill. I suspect Mr Yglesias might well take a different view of barbering than say a female African-American blogger would. Thus, to Yglesias, deregulating barbering would probably mean less change and seem easier, while a woman who wanted a more elaborate cut, and one involved with chemicals/bleaches (and what have you) might well consider that more training and more regulation would be needed, not less.
morzer
@Yutsano:
Yes, but this doesn’t address the issue of what we now call the supply chain. Restaurants may well have higher standards for food preparation, but if their raw materials are not adequately regulated then you end up in a situation where the customer who consumes a hamburger may end up becoming seriously unwell even though the restaurant was meticulous in its preparation of the food. That’s the point I am arguing, not that restaurants need more regulation.
morzer
@Yutsano:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/health/04meat.html
This is only the most spectacular of a series of recent cases involving ground beef. The real horror of the story comes in how the ‘meat” she ate was put together.
The hamburger she ate was cooked by her mother, but it could just as easily have been prepared by a local restaurant using the same brand of hamburger. Effectively, the gap here in food safety IS the norm.
JamesC
@morzer:
Wouldn’t that assume that those same ills don’t apply to the cooks as well? Which is false. Especially because of the high incidence of minor wounds, exposure is arguably greater for the cooks than for the eater. Your digestive tract does happen to serve as a first line of defense against minor problems. Getting pig’s blood right over an open wound isn’t nearly as safe.
morzer
@JamesC:
That would depend on whether they were trained in handling food adequately. Certainly, cooking with an open wound, much less risking blood or other substances getting into it would be deeply inadvisable. That said, my point isn’t that cooks have no risk, simply that customers carry rather more risk than you seemed to be suggesting.
Xenos
@E.D. Kain: Sure, but let us be clear. We now, like parts of Europe, have permanent structural unemployment north of 15%. So when you say, in the present context, ‘let us have unemployment insurance, just like in Europe’, what you are advocating is the dole.
As a lefty I would argue that stripping trade protections means the dole has been made necessary. Either way, I don’t see any other way to take care of the 10% of the workforce that is utterly screwed at this point in time.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
@morzer:
Unfortunately, some people like to think that they have the answer to whatever ails us but many times their ideas are not that well thought through. I worked in the marine industry and while people grouse about the regulations everyone knows that they are there for a reason. You have to learn that stuff and that requires a lot of study. You want professionals to be held to a high standard and regulations help to assure that. No, not all regulations are necessarily good but not all regulation are bad either. Many times when people think an industry has ‘too much’ regulation in reality they are not knowledgeable about exactly what all that industry entails, they think they have ‘the answer’ to the problem and sometimes getting them to listen to reason can be difficult.
Reality does that to some people, they just can’t face the fact that their answer is not the right one. Discussing issues like this is one way to make people think a bit deeper about an idea they thought would be workable. Of course, that only works if the person who has the idea is willing to listen to the thoughts of others. If they are marching in ideological lockstep with a particular political philosophy then all bets are off. Talking to a brick wall would be more productive.
For those anti-regulation supporters, how about safety regulations; for example OSHA and its state level variants? Are their regulations unnecessary and best left to the respective industries to handle, letting the
victimcustomer be the final word on whether or not a business succeeds? :)kay
I always assumed that the reason barbers and stylists (and truck drivers and real estate agents) are trained and then licensed at their own expense is that the license is portable, and generic, in the sense that they receive the same training for each (or any) employer.
Most of them are essentially independent contractors, right?
They carry the training and license from employer-location to employer-location or set up their own shop, or buy their own truck.
They require fewer managers because they arrive as contractors, don’t need training, and they’re responsible for maintaining (keeping) their own license, by following the rules inherent in the license privilege.
I think you’d be taking them from independent contractors to employees, which may or may not be better, but would add a layer of managers, because they’d need training and supervision.
kay
Well, sure he does. He supervises. He’s a manager. While he’s in the room he also acts as a dentist, so that’s handy.
I think you’d just end up replacing the dentist-manager with a manager-manager, and the manager wouldn’t have the value-added benefit of also being a dentist.
I think you’re replacing the expensive dentist with an expensive manager.
Unless the hygienist is essentially an independent contractor, and then we’re right back to the beauty shop-real estate-trucking model.
JGabriel
These posts need more creative tags. For instance, in a post about deregulation might actually be useful instead of reflexive, the tag could be: Ayn Rand Meets Stopped Clock.
.
morzer
@JGabriel:
The problem is that your proposed tag would describe Megan McArdle perfectly, Yglesias.. not so much.
JamesC
@morzer:
And my point is that all the risks that the customer face is one that the cook already faced, possibly at greater levels, prior to the food actually getting ready. So even if you account for a higher degree of risk on part of the customer than what I was initially suggesting, you’re only increasing the scope of the cook’s own in turn.
Can proper training offset those risks? Yeah, though note that even in the Food Network era, most /cooks/, not chefs, basically made their way up in ranks the hard way. But either way you’re still gonna be cuttin’ a few hundred pounds of meat after a few cuts on yourself. And the cooks’ll be eating from the worst of it in turn, come their break. Arguing otherwise merely suggests that you’re unfamiliar with the actual work involved behind the average order counter. Or you’re mistaking the Mexican place down the street for the French Laundry.
Well, unless it’s mussels. You’re on your own with shellfish.
duck-billed placelot
Wouldn’t chopping up cosmetology licensing into these various sections (basic scissor safety I, coloring, perms 1 & 2, etc) just make schooling and licensing way more expensive and onerous for barbers/stylists? Instead of one year cosmetology programs, there would be eight to ten separate and distinct courses, with separate and distinct prices at for-profit, Kaplan-esque “cosmetology universities” in no time. And that model has worked out so well in other areas of education.
Also, too, I really, really doubt that most salons have the kind of income that would allow them to segregate labor in this way. Sure, fashionable NY salons can have colorists, cutter, and stylists, but most places need the majority of workers to be able to handle any client request.
kay
@morzer:
Yglesias scheme is like the Full Employment for Managers Act.
How do they think “training” happens, in an employer-employee set-up? It’s not free, managers do it, and managers have to be paid.
I guess you could have a stylist-manager, but then she’s not cutting hair, she’s training and supervising employees.
morzer
@JamesC:
I was more impressed by your argument before you began making assumptions and getting snippy. You over-generalized in the first place, and attributing a series of straw-men to me doesn’t add to the persuasive power of what you’ve just said.
geg6
@kay:
THIS.
Yglesius is an idiot about this and I can only guess it’s because he understands little to nothing about how the hair industry works. And the idea that cosmetology school is unneccessary, or ridiculously expensive, or prohibitively long term is just nuts. Newly licensed cosmetologists already undergo apprentceships after the first step of licensing, just like plumbers or electricians do once on the job. They start just washing hair, move to blowing out, styling, and cutting, with color experts at the highest end of training. The licensing is just the start of years of training but is a signal to all that the most basic skills and safety measures are in place. It allows them to be the independent contractors that most of them are, it is a relatively short training period for a trade, and mostly cost effective when you look at earning potential over a lifetime.
Linda Featheringill
Ah Erik. You are an anarchist.
I know some guys over at Red and Black that would be happy to talk with you about it.
[I’m kidding. Sort of.]
Good morning. :-)
Jack Bauer
Half price haircuts by our apprentice barbers, today only!
That would work fine, it’s the same as getting your teeth worked on at a dentists school, no?
It’s really nice to read a post/thread where some of the ideas make sense instinctively. ED has the welfare state/freemarket of northern Europe correct. We call it social democracy.
bookcat
People get their battle lines drawn too easily these days. Someone who identifies as an open minded person shouldn’t, by definition, close their mind as soon as someone the *think* is from the “other side” speaks.
When I lived in Portland, OR I met many lefties who were strongly anti big government when it came to regulations that hurt small had businesses. Many small farms are hurt by organic regulations that benefit big agri business. The same is happening with the locavore movement to some degree.
I think many liberals experience frustration with mindless ridiculous regulations that stifle innovation etc but don’t want to give fuel to the crazies on the right by voicing those concerns. It’s a nuanced approach that is needed. The safety net- yes, civil rights, yes, environment -yes. But ask environmentalists even about how screwed up the National Park Service is. It’s complicated. We don’t do complicated well in this country.
I really do believe it comes down to the fact that we have an all or nothing approach to things. I understand why but left runs the risk of becoming as locked into their positions as the right.
Michael
You know, even if the anti-barber marketarians are right that licensing is artificial economic protectionism, so what? Haircut demand is pretty inelastic, and hairdressing (despite Yglesias’ protests) is skilled labor; while forcing prices down might be an ideological triumph for the Cato crowd, it comes at the cost of a living wage for, y’know, actual barbers and hairdressers. (Not to mention the market confusion and inevitable string of torts from a minimal/no licensing regime.) Training/licensing is not only good in itself, it’s also as good a proxy as we have for “commitment to the field”; why not use it to restrict supply, and let the market set prices, not for “haircuts,” but for “safe and competent haircuts”? Otherwise the market will price out the safe and competent.
The only difference between Yglesias and McArdle is that Matthew has been socialized enough to know that you should only say “fuck the poors” under your breath.
t jasper parnell
@E.D. Kain: “meddling” like clean food and drugs, like regulating who gets to be doctor by insisting that doctors are trained to be, you know, doctors. Sure some regulations are silly or stupid or just plain wrong and these regulation might need to be revisited and revised. But the idea that getting rid of regulations will make us all free and happy ignores the actually existing history of the imposition of regulations in the first place. Secondly, Matt Y is dumb and his position on regulations is dumb. How dumb is he? He is very nearly as dumb as Douthat and here’s the proof. As an aside to his dumbness, he and you might go away read a book or two on state building in the West in the pre and post Westphalian eras instead of pulling stuff out of your asses.
t jasper parnell
One more point, opponents of the regulatory state like to find some now absurd regulation, point and laugh and then insist on throwing babies out with the bathwater. So, how about this, proponents of markets free and unfettered from, as Tom Paine put it, the greedy grasping hand of government need to explain how it was that prior to TR, who we’ll use as a placeholder, neither the law nor self-interest led our successful capitalists of yesteryear voluntarily to sell unadulterated products, pay their adult workers either a fair or a living wage, shun child labor, provide for the common good via universal education, or protect the environment.
MY’s blithe and idiotic claim that concern over getting sued if your unlicensed barber slit your throat with his straight edged raiser not withstanding, lets have some evidence that quacks disappeared from some profession or another absent state intervention or, perhaps even more importantly, state support for the self-policing of specific professions, like medicine. Sure there are still quacks around. But how is limiting the state’s ability to regulate going to get rid of the quacks, I ask.
In the actual past of an actual country in the period between, lets say, 1900 and 1980 the state acted to reign in the excesses of the wealthy and in the course of so doing created one of the largest and wealthiest middle classes in history. In the period since? Less regulation and freer markets to be sure but greater income inequality, a declining middle class, more frequent economic crises, and so on.
T.R. Donoghue
He’s become Chunky Megan McArdle – insufferable, misguided and unreadable.
JamesC
@morzer:
I apologize if I offended, but I was going more for snark than snippy.
t jasper parnell
Oh and as by the way, the linked article is a bit on the misleading side. If you read to the end the 300 dollars is for a lifetime; it costs 50 dollars for a year and strong minded and serious legislators whose commitment to deregulating the market is designed to increase equality and stop the state from screwing the poor want to ensure that for-profit bloggers “would no longer have to pay taxes on their first $100,000 in profit.”
BC
If you look at it, the licensing of hairdressers and cosmetologists protect both the salon owner and the consumer. The consumer is assured that the personnel in a salon have passed the tests required for the license; the salon owner is assured the same. There is just no good apprentice path, as no salon owner wants to be tagged as a place where inexperienced hairdressers practice. Even in the salons where the individual hairdressers rent space, it is in the interest of all that there be minimal competency as a botched job tends to taint everyone practicing in the salon. An unlicensed hairdresser is an unemployed hairdresser (maybe practicing out of residence). Given the convergence of interests, I don’t see a problem with the state licensing these professions. You don’t need a degree from a beauty school, necessarily, you just need to pass the test for the license. A beauty school will teach you what you need to know, but it’s not like you need it. Same with bar exam to be a lawyer – if you can pass the exam, you can practice law. It’s just easier if you have a course of study that helps you pass the exam.
Bob
Thanks for that, E.D., but hardly what I call free markets. Regulation does not equal free in my admittedly limited understanding of English.
Yep, just a freaking slogan!
Paris
This is what happens when I get my teeth cleaned. I don’t know what planet you live on.
gnomedad
I don’t equate “free markets” with “unregulated markets”. To me, the “free” means that anyone can participate, and that prices are determined by competition and negotiation. Maybe I missed a memo somewhere.
Good post, E.D. This is exactly the kind of discussion I look to “sane conservatives” to provoke.
Sly
@E.D. Kain:
The “free” in free markets has more to do with accessibility than anything else. The error in libertarian thinking is that markets are, by default, accessible to all. They aren’t. There are a whole host of anti-competitive practices a firm could employ to limit the access of their competitors to a marketplace. And there are types of economic activity that are, by their nature, prone to anti-competitive schemes. Insurance and financial products are probably the two biggest ones (generally anywhere that the risk of adverse selection, or information asymmetry between buyer and seller, is high).
Laws that make those practices illegal, or reduce the level of anti-competitiveness ingrained into a particular kind of market, are “interventions” by government. Interventions that make those markets free.
Keith G
Some quick thoughts E.D.:
Barbers (or stylists) do things that can have serious consequences. Commenters above have typed about burns and bad haircuts. Sure.
Keep in mind that without due diligence, it is the nature of the task of cutting hair that parasites and infections can be easily transmitted from customer to customer. Blood drawn by a side-swiped mole or a nicked ear can be a red bin bio hazard.
I am an AIDS patient. I like keeping my exposure to miscellaneous infections as low as possible. As might you.
I know, “Whats to say that a cosmology diploma assures limited risk?” It doesn’t, but those students have, over a length of time, been conditioned (pun not intended, actually) to behave in certain “mechanical” ways. These ingrained behaviors are important to the public health.
Finally. In my state, AFAIK, hair salon regulation is rather passive. The bureaucracy depends on the licensing process and the visible displaty of photo ID certificates as an primary step in enforcement.
If licensing was stripped down as in food handlers, would you be more in favor of a larger bureaucracy to handle on-site inspections (as in the food industry)?
Okay, less quick than I planned. I should have cut it shorter (pun intended).
Ecks
@silentbeep:
Very late back to the debate, this thread is prolly dead now, but FWIW:
Totally agreed this is all I was saying. Beauty school is usefl, and isn’t going anywhere. If the gov stopped requiring people to go most of them still would because it is a useful place. But beyond the requirements that people know how to be safe, the market should do an adequate job of demanding properly competent hairdressers without any gov interference… Just like lots of people go to chef school to learn to cook without any gov requirement, or take technical drafting courses, without any gov requirement, or any other form of training.
To sum: Safety, yes, force it. Everything else, a light hand on the tiller should pull through fine.
georgia pig
The problem with a lot of these arguments attacking licensing of barbers and similar regulations based on “free trade” is that they fail to perform the analytical steps that are necessary to determine whether there is an unreasonable restraint of trade, e.g., they fail to first determine (1) whether there is monopoly pricing and (2) whether the licensing requirement is the cause of the monopoly pricing. In the case of barbers and beauticians, I think the answer to both questions is clearly no. For real estate agents, there may be some monopoly/cartel pricing, but it’s probably because of industry collusion, not the licensing requirements.
Professional haircuts and perms are not a necessity. If prices for haircuts were monopolistic because of licensing requirements, you can bet a lot more guys would go around looking like Moe. A lot of anti-regulation critiques often are just some guys bitching because their nice haircut cost more that they think it should because they think any idiot can cut hair. Notice that these anti-regulatory arguments almost always are about things that people think they can do themselves, like cutting hair and brewing beer.
Having to go to barber or beautician’s school is not a serious restraint on trade, as we have no shortage of barbershops, salons and nail parlors and pricing seems to be more affected by exclusivity and other factors that have nothing to do with licensing. In addition, licensing in these trades does reinforce a sense of professionalism, because it requires the proprietor to make an investment in his trade that he stands to lose if he screws up too much (assuming the licensing system is not corrupt, which is a different issue). Licensing in these trades can also provide the public with some confidence that, when they go to a barbershop, they’re not likely to be completely hacked up. Sure, no one ever died of a bad haircut, but should you have to inordinately worry about that possible outcome? What free-market anti-regulation zealots don’t get is that it can be incredibly inefficient for people to have to hunt for quality signals in everything they engage in. Licensing often provides a simple guidepost for consumers so they don’t waste a bunch of time trying to figure out more subtle and unreliable quality cues.
E.D. Kain
@Ecks: Exactly right. The government can’t anyways. Lord knows that even with the existing silly requirements you can still get a bad haircut.
E.D. Kain
@silentbeep: One of my friends went to beauty school. It took about nine months to a year, was pretty damn expensive (will have to find that out) and when he was done he only ended up working in the hair business about a year before he decided that it just wasn’t right for him. Of course, he couldn’t really find that out until he’d already wasted time and money. Then again, this is part of my larger crusade against over-priced private schools for basic medium-skilled professions.
E.D. Kain
@Yutsano: Most people who want to cut hair for a living should be able to practice at home on family and maybe on some friends before they go look for a job doing it.
E.D. Kain
@asiangrrlMN: The point is that the government shouldn’t require it for licensing. If private hair shops required it for people to work there that would be fine.
E.D. Kain
@morzer: I’m all in favor of transparency everywhere including on food labels. Good for consumers, and in the long run I think it’s good for producers as well.
E.D. Kain
@Xenos: No let’s not do it exactly like Europe but let’s learn from their mistakes and from their successes. A lot of European countries have (and had) better employment numbers than we did (and do).
Keith G
@E.D. Kain:
But the silly requirements and the learned behaviors that they reinforce may well keep you from getting Impetigo or tinea capitis or hepatitis B or C.
mclaren
For crap’s sake, people, all Kain is saying is that the goddamn government needs to stop acting as a mafia enforcer to artificially sustain the livelihoods of private industry where there isn’t a compelling public benefit for doing so.
Example: local governments should get the hell out of giving cable companies monopolies. End that crap. That’s artificial protection of a broken business model. That’s the local government acting as mafia enforcer to keep Comcast and other parasites in business when they charge outrageously high fees for cable TV.
End that crap. Cable TV companies say they’re in business, let ’em act like businessmen and not like owners of protection rackets. They can damn well compete with 50 other cable TV companies, and if they don’t like it, they can fuck off. Someone else will swoop in and make money.
Same deal with other kinds of licenses. Most licensed professions today are a holdover of medieval guild rackets for artificially protecting a business model that would collapse without it. Case in point: accounting. Licensing is supposed to make accountants “professional.” Yeah, well, we saw how fvcking professional the accountants were when they signed off on Enron’s fraudulent deals, and how fvcking professional the accountants were when they testilied by signing on the dotted line that, yes indeed, all those liar loans and bogus underwater mortgages were perfectly legit accounting to GAAP (Grotesquely Atrocious Accounting Pimping — excuse me, General Accepted Accounting Principles).
Licensing for lawyers is bogus. Back in the 19th century, lawyers didn’t graduate from law schools or have to pass the bar. They demonstrated their expertise to a judge and got sworn in. The learned by apprenticing with another lawyer. Society didn’t seem to break down into Mad Max anarchy. A law license is just a mafia protection racket scam to artificially keep the cost of lawyers sky-high.
Licensing we need for doctors. For obvious reasons. But licensing in most professions is a scam. We should get rid of it in most cases.
You people yip about all the dangerous toxic chemicals hairdressers have to use. If the goddamn chemicals are that dangerous, they shouldn’t be used. Period. Ban ’em. I’m a guy, I’ve never needed bleach or peroxide or any of that crap. If you want to look like Ziggy Stardust from the Spiders of Mars, you may need peroxide and bleach, and in that case, there’s something wrong with you. Ditto if you’re a black woman and you desperately need your hair straightened. That’s crap. You need chemicals so toxic to straight a black woman’s hair that you shouldn’t be doing it, period. People who do that suffer from poor self-image. They need to see a counselor, not a hairdresser.
Bleaching with peroxide or straightening or uncurling hair is usually a frantic and unsuccessful attempt to mimic the dominant characteristics of a pathological white culture which has pale skin and straight silky hair. Well, here’s a clue for you, folks…if you’re not white, you’re still beautiful even if you don’t have pale skin or straight silky blonde hair. The solution is not use a crapload of toxic chemicals on your hair, it’s to look in the mirror and say “I am asian and I am beautiful” or “I am black and I am beautiful.” Or “I am [fill in the blank] and I am beautiful.”
This is 2010, people, you can be black with kinky hair or asian with black hair or american indian or whatever-the-hell and everyone will think you look great. You don’t need a boatload of goddamn toxic chemicals to strip your hair or straighten your hair or bleach your hair platinum blonde (there is nothing weirder and uglier than an asian woman with bleached platinum blonde hair) or uncurl your hair or whateverthehell crazy crap you’re doing to your hair.
And yes, I’m well aware of harajuku fashion and ganguro fashion and the rest of that weirdness. Those girls look like space aliens. If you want to make yourself look like that, then you deserve to run the risk of getting blinded or having your scalp burned, so you can get your friend to do it in the sink .
You people keep calling Kain a “liberal.” He’s not. He’s what everyone used to call a “conservative” until Reagan destroyed conservatism in 1980.
DEFINITION:
Someone who is called a “dirty f*cking hippy liberal” in 2010 is someone who was called an “Eisenhower conservative” in 1956.
Someone who is called a “conservative” in 2010 is someone who was called a “mental patient” in 1956.
There.
Are we clear now on the terminology?
Tim Connor
Yeah, of course the law is USUALLY a tool for the rich and powerful. (See bankruptcy “reform”.) When it’s not, they begin campaigns, parotted by the media, for “reform”.
Should we do away with law?
Doktor Ziellos
E.D. Kain: “The ‘state’ certainly has been used for great evil for many thousands of years, but democracy and liberalism helped create a much more limited state than anything previously. ”
I’d like to respectfully disagree here by emphasizing not the powers of intrusion of the modern state, but size. The American state is massive, yet our political culture is blind to its size: our prison system is the largest in the world, as is our military-industrial complex. It is not as oppressive, but it certainly reaches into more aspects of our lives than say absolutism or feudalism.
Americans often take regulations and federal handouts for granted while mouthing libertarian bromides. Take a look at the cognitive dissonance in a “frontier” like Alaska:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/19/business/19stimulus.html?pagewanted=1
One of the more fascinating aspects of libertarianism is that in terms of comparative politics, it doesn’t seem to have a state model. If the liberal democratic state is too regulated, too authoritarian, then what nation is your political economic ideal? Iceland of the mid-00’s?
catclub
@asiangrrlMN:
So to do something right, and to learn to do something right takes time and expensive schooling.
On that we agree.
But the government licensing – which is really the incumbents of the field getting together to make it hard for others to enter the field without their permission –
is the part where there is disagreement.
The licensing often requires training in an accredited school.
Suppose someone is from another country? Why can’t they demonstrate competence rather than be required to show a diploma from an accredited school?
This is why we have fewer than optimal number of doctors trained in other countries – ask Dean Baker.
The incumbents ignore perfectly COMPETENT outsiders who do not have the diploma from an accredited – by them-
school.
Did Paula Abdul go to an unlicensed place for her manicure? I don’t know. But it is perfectly possible it HAD all its licenses – but the people there were incompetent.
The licensing board did not fix that problem – it just made her manicure more expensive.
brantl
E.D. Kain is full of shit, again. Europe has some of the strongest safety regulation (heard about how U.S. cosmetics are considered toxic in Europe, E.D.?) on the freaking planet. Their regulations are significantly stronger than ours. As in, in oil drilling, too. Blow out preventers aren’t optional, and their testing isn’t elided, either.
Keith G
@mclaren: So if I understand you, “Enron’s fraudulent deals” are the reason there shouldn’t be state licensing of barbers. Right.
Midnight Marauder
@E.D. Kain:
In no way is this a realistic thing.
Bob
@Midnight Marauder: E.D. has no choice but to engage in this sort of magical thinking since his starting point is bunk.
scarshapedstar
I think most dentists would take issue with this, insomuch as nobody goes into the dentist for a checkup and so this is pretty much the only chance to check for cavities.
Full disclosure: my mom’s a dentist.
Mark
A little late here, but two points:
1) DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective was merely responding to ED calling him “stuck in his ways.” That was the original dick move, not his response.
2) ED should sack up a bit here and talk about what’s wrong with regulation in a profession that more of us know about. Let’s get some concrete suggestions – with some freaking evidence – about how modifying health insurance and health care regulations (in the direction of deregulation) would improve our lives.
Like tort reform. California got tort reform 30 years ago with MICRA. It has had zero impact on our health insurance costs, but it has made it cheaper for incompetent obstetricians to operate.
Or the health insurance exchanges. The CBO says they’ll be 3-4% more expensive than single-payer. And Medicare Advantage is even worse – 13% more expensive than single-payer for the same services.
Seriously, “free markets” really is a slogan unless you can come up with an example where they’ve helped us.
Bob
@Mark:
I’d like an example of where they exist (on a large scale).
Michael
60s Marxist: “You can’t say Communism’s a failure ’cause real Communism’s never even been tried, man.”
80s, 90s, 00s, 10s Free-marketeer: Oh, finish the joke yourself.
mclaren
No, Kain’s starting point is solid and sensible. It’s you guys who are out to lunch. Dreaming up far-fetched scenarios where hairstylists blind someone is a ludicrous response.
Kain is right on this one. We need a crapload less licensing of professions outside of doctors and tattoo parlors and alughterhouses and OSHA in hazardous work environments and a few other cases where there’s a compelling public interest.
There’s a wide range of libertarianism. On the one hand, you’ve got Somalia…on the other hand, you’ve got Montana. The right to be left alone is important. We need to get back to that in America. This idea that government needs to regulate every damn aspect of our lives is pernicious, it’s the kind of craziness that has now led cops to shut down little girls’ lemonade stands because they don’t have a vendors’ license. It’s the kind of insanity that leads TSA goons to frisk grannies in wheelchairs. That’s moronic, and if you disagree that it’s moronic, you don’t deserve to be taken seriously.
You guys need to remember a little quote by George Washington:
We need to get government the hell out of our lives except where it has a compelling reason to butt in. That’s not some exotic new sentiment…that’s one of the basic principles of the constitution. Take a look at the tenth amendment if you don’t believe me. All powers not specifically enumerated to the federal government revert to the states.
There’s a convergence here between liberals and conservatives that people don’t seem to have noticed. DFH’s have an intense interest in getting government the hell out of the private lives (smoking weed, doing acid, polyamory, etc.) and conservatives also have a deep concern about getting government out of their personal affairs (gun ownership, REAL ID bullshit, “let me see your papers” police state tactics everywhere you go, etc.).
One of Kain’s important points that you guys are overlooking is that there’s a huge common interest that overlaps between sane conservatives and extreme liberals here. Cut the regulation, strip out the unnecessary licensing, leave people alone unless there’s a compelling public benefit for government to butt its nose in.
Keith G
@mclaren:
Really? A discussion about barber licensing get you here:
I hope you are a performance artist or have some really good blotter under your tongue – or both.
Mark
@Bob – obviously no such thing exists as a truly free market. But instead of talking about barbers and breweries, I’d like some examples where de-regulation and privatization in consequential businesses helped more than the owners of the businesses that were able to remove the laws that hurt them while retaining the ones that protected them.
I know a guy who says the problem with Bush is that he didn’t sufficiently de-regulate. He wants a flat tax on income but not capital gains and dividends. He wants private everything except the army, police, fire departments and road construction. IOW, free market benefits for himself.
silentbeep
@E.D. Kain:
One of my cousins went to beauty school and had a similar experience to your friend. The thing is, I think of experiences like this: this is the risk one takes when you go to school. My father went to college, and ended up in a blue collar job: sitting in an office, was just not for him after all. Sorry, but this is the student’s problem, not the school’s problem.
If it works, beauticians can make a good living. I have a slightly different perspective about this, perhaps. I live in L.A. I know people can have a decent living doing makeup and hair for the movies, T.V. and photo shoots – I know someone that does this. I also know small business owners, that own their own salon and do relatively well. I have family members that got a beauty license, and ran their own business out of their homes for decades.
There area lot of people that enter school for a profession, even law school, and then find out they hate it. Again, not the school’s problem.
JITC
Is it actually DIFFICULT to get a barber’s license? Cost prohibitive? The crux of E.D.’s argument is that a barber’s license is somehow a difficult to surmount barrier to entry to the profession of barbering/hair dressing. Is that actually true?
He said that “the licensing should fit the job and should provide a reasonable test of a person’s ability to practice that job safely.” Do barbers’ licenses go beyond that or something?
Maybe a better example is needed (I think it was chosen because the initial gut reaction is that “some person was actually licensed to give me this bang trim” and that seems silly).
The dental hygienist discussion is interesting, and allowing them to do more with less supervision would keep consumer costs down. However, what is the reasoning behind the regulations? Is it really to protect a “dentist cartel”? What is the proof of that?
Show me the dentist cartel and I will stand against it. Until then, I will appreciate the fact that my dental hygienist does a great job cleaning my teeth and taking my X-rays while my dentist analyzes the X-rays and examines my teeth.
silentbeep
@silentbeep:
Additionally: beauty school is damn expensive if you find out hairsyling is not for you. Any time you go to school, and find out that you don’t like the thing you went to school for, it feels like a waste of time and money. The cost of beauty school, again, is on par with any other type of vocational training, such as culinary school. For those that are good at it, and are able to make it that profession work for them, beauty school can be paid back within several years – we are not talking about a debilitating set of student loans. Beauty schools offer financial aid. They offer part-time night courses. For a career that can allow you the appropriate training to get your own business off the ground, the time and money is not inherently unreasonable.
fasteddie9318
Sorry, nit-picky pet peeve time:
You want affect here, ED; “effect” as a verb means “to create,” and you want the verb for “to impact,” which is affect.
kay
@JITC:
Do people want to go twice? Does it even save them any money to go twice? What about the cost of their time?
It’s an hour and half not working, minimum, right, for each visit?
I think I’d lose money with a trip for a cleaning and then a trip for the dentist.
Chuck Butcher
Ah crap, once again with the free market talking point. Goddamit EDK, give me one point in history with a free market that I can’t easily refute and I’ll lay off you. This little mantra is asshattery of the most inserted sort – NO SUCH THING HAS EVER EXISTED!
No, not once; not in the most fevered wet dreams of any of your ilk has this ever been practiced. Prove me wrong by coughing up one damned example – that ought to be really really easy; if it ever existed.
arguingwithsignposts
@mclaren: That’s a mighty big straw man you’ve built there. Do you have a license to construct those? Or a building permit?
mclaren
@arguingwithsignposts:
If you can give some specific logic and some detailed evidence to show that anything I’ve said constitutes a straw man, please do.
Otherwise it sounds as though you’re grumbling that what Kain and I are saying is right on the money but you don’t feel comfortable with it and don’t have any logic or evidence to rebut our arguments.
By the way, Kain explicitly pointed out that he is not proposing to dismantle OSHA or anything like that. Kain was careful to point out that he’s hammering away at cartels created by excessive licensing requirements — not just regulation. And dentists are a perfect example of a grossly corrupt cartel created by licensing requirements. If you live in SoCal, go across the border to Tijuana and you’ll get dental treatment for 1/10 the price, just as good, simply free of the corrupt dental cartel that rules America.
Dental costs are wayyyyyyyyyyy out of control in America. It’s killing people because they can’t afford dental care and their teeth get infected and they die. Dental care is as grossly overpriced in America as health care, and needs to be reformed just as badly as health care. In fact, given the known and proven link twixt heart disease and dental caries, reforming dental care and breaking the dental cartels and reducing the cost of dental care is part of reforming health care. A lot of heart disease is caused by people’s inability to afford dental care. This is exactly what I was talking about in the health care discussions when I mentioned that America grossly neglects preventive care in favor of heroic interventions. We’d much prefer to do an open heart operation to insert stents and do a bypass rather than prevent the heart disease in the first place by making dental care affordable and avoiding the dental caries that contribute to heart disease. (America would also much rather do heart bypass operations than reform their eating habits and cut down on fatty fast foods, another huge issue in preventive medicine in America.)
Source: Dental disease as a risk factor for cardiovascular disease.
mclaren
@Keith G:
What’s the problem with that statement? It’s perfectly reasonable. Government hassling barbers is as ridiculous and as unnecessary as the government hassling some grannie in a wheelchair when she wants to board a plane.
Both are stupid. Both are ridiculous overextensions of government power. Both are unnecessary. Both are counterproductive. Both represent a grotesque waste of government resources. Both are intrusive and offensive.
Count down to the crackpot liberals giving hysterical examples of hypothetical people who freeze to death because an unlicensed barber cuts their hair too short in…3…2…1…
Ecks
@Mark:
Ok, this thread is prolly LOOOONG dead, but there’s a study by some UCLA guys that says MICRA actually helps the little guy. I haven’t looked into the details of it (no dog in this fight really), but it’s an interesting claim.
Abstract:
JITC
@kay:
Go twice? Sorry, I didn’t mean to give that impression.
I don’t go twice. My dentist is there and while the hygienist is doing the X-rays and cleaning, she is seeing other patients, reviewing other x-ray films, etc. Then, at some point, she comes in to check in with me, review my films, examine me, etc.
My dentist is able to book more appointments because a lot of the physical and time consuming work (and initial assessment) is being done by the hygienist(s). At the same time, I get the attention and specialized skills of a dentist.
Similarly, I like nurse practitioners for many basic services and examinations. But for certain things, I want a doctor to review and consult.