A license to stay poor

www.americanthinker.com

America has a strange way of talking to poor people.

We tell them to stop depending on government. We tell them to learn a skill, start a business, take responsibility, and build something of their own.

Then, when they attempt to do exactly that, the government steps in and asks whether they have purchased permission.

Permission to cut hair.

Permission to shampoo hair.

Permission to provide certain beauty services.

Permission to work in trades they may already know.

Permission to continue doing a job after moving across a state line.

We call this occupational licensing. In many cases, I think a more honest name would be the license to stay poor.

There are professions that clearly require regulation. I do not want an untrained man performing heart surgery because he watched three instructional videos online. I want electricians, structural engineers, pharmacists, and other professionals whose mistakes could kill people to demonstrate basic competence.

That is common sense—but common sense is not what government does best.

Once a licensing system exists, it always grows. The protected profession gains a board. The board creates standards. The standards create fees, mandatory classroom hours, examinations, renewal requirements, continuing education, and restrictions on who may enter the market.

Before long, the licensing board is no longer merely “protecting the public” from dangerous incompetence. It is protecting existing professionals from competition.

That difference is important.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 21.6 percent of employed Americans held a government-issued occupational license in 2025. Another 2.5 percent held a professional certification without a license. A certification demonstrates training or skill. A license gives the government the legal authority to tell someone that he may not work at all.

That is an enormous power.

The government is not merely warning consumers that a worker may lack credentials. It is threatening the worker with penalties for earning money without government approval.

Conservatives should have a serious problem with that.

We claim to believe that a man has a right to his labor. Yet in a growing number of occupations, his labor does not legally belong to him until he completes whatever process the state has created.

The Federal Trade Commission has acknowledged that occupational licensing can increase prices, reduce competition, limit consumer choice, and restrict workers who move between states. The FTC also recognizes what I did above, that licensing may be justified in occupations involving genuine health and safety concerns. The issue is whether the restrictions imposed are actually connected to the risks involved.

That should be the test: Is the license preventing a specific and obvious danger, or is it simply making it harder for new people to compete in the market?

Those questions become especially important when discussing black entrepreneurship.

For years, politicians have told black Americans that the answer to economic inequality is ownership. Start businesses. Build wealth. Become employers instead of remaining permanent employees and consumers. I agree.

But we should also admit that government frequently places the largest obstacles directly in front of people with the least money.

Consider hair braiding.

African hair braiding is not some recently invented commercial trend. It is a skill passed through families and communities for generations. Many black women learn it long before they ever consider opening a business.

Yet some states have required hair braiders to obtain cosmetology licenses even when cosmetology schools provided little or no meaningful instruction in African-style braiding.

The FTC documented the experience of an Arkansas hair-braiding entrepreneur who was required to confront cosmetology licensing rules before the state eventually exempted hair braiders. Her problem was not that she lacked the ability to braid hair. Her problem was that the government did not recognize the way she had learned.

That is more than bureaucratic stupidity.

It reveals how licensing can favor formal institutions over practical knowledge.

A woman may have braided hair successfully for twenty years, but the government values a classroom certificate more than two decades of satisfied customers. A man may have learned a trade from his father, worked beside him for years, and developed real competence, but the state may still require him to purchase additional training before he may legally work for himself.

The people defending these systems usually say the requirements protect consumers, and sometimes they do—but other times, “consumer protection” becomes a respectable phrase used to hide economic protectionism.

Existing businesses benefit when fewer competitors are allowed into the market. Licensed professionals can charge more when government artificially limits supply. Schools benefit when the law forces students to purchase hundreds of hours of instruction. Licensing boards justify their continued existence by creating more rules to enforce. And all of that financial weight is loaded onto the shoulders of people who don’t have lobbyists.

The National Conference of State Legislatures now tracks licensing requirements, fees, training rules, and reform legislation across dozens of occupations and every state. The fact that the rules differ so widely raises an obvious question: How can the same worker be considered qualified on one side of a state line and dangerous on the other?

A haircut does not become more dangerous when the barber moves from Texas to Louisiana, a teacher does not forget how to teach when her military spouse receives new orders, and a skilled tradesman does not lose his knowledge when he crosses a bridge.

Yet state licensing regimes often behave as though competence expires at the border. (State sovereignty only exists when the state can financially exploit it.)

Government has a right to intervene in the market only to protect our God-given rights to life, liberty, and property, and it should prosecute fraud, negligence, theft, abuse, and dangerous practices. What it should not do is automatically assume that every person is dangerous until he purchases permission to work.

States should adopt a simple standard: no occupation should require a license unless lawmakers can demonstrate that the occupation presents a clear and significant threat to public health or safety. Most importantly, we should place the burden of proof where it belongs.

A citizen should not have to prove why he deserves the right to earn a living; the government should have to prove why it has the authority to stop him.

Economic freedom is not an abstract concern reserved for corporations and wealthy investors. It matters most to the person trying to turn one skill into one customer, one customer into a business, and one business into a better life.

Poor people do not need another program; they need the government to get out of the doorway.

We cannot keep preaching self-sufficiency while making independence conditional upon fees, forms, classroom hours, and the approval of people already protected from competition.

If a person can perform lawful work without creating a serious threat to anyone else, let him work.

He does not need another lecture about personal responsibility, he needs his government to stop selling licenses to stay poor.

Image: Pexels.