Licensing

The higher entry standards imposed by licensing laws reduce the supply of professional services... The poor are net losers, because the availability of low-cost service has been reduced. In essence, the poor subsidize the information research costs of the rich.
- S. David Young, THE RULE OF EXPERTS


...most of the evidence suggests that licensing has, at best, a neutral effect on quality and may even cause harm to the consumers.
- S. David Young, RULE OF EXPERTS


...mainly the research refutes the claim that licensing protects the public.
- Stanley Gross, Professor of Psychology, Indiana State University


...restricting the practice of what is called medicine and confining it... to a particular group, who in the main have to conform to the prevailing orthodoxy, is certain to reduce the amount of experimentation that goes on and hence to reduce the rate of growth and knowledge in the area.
- Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize winner, Economics


...by proper orthomolecular measures, mostly nutritional, it is possible for people to extend the length of the period of both life and well-being by about 25 years.
- Linus Pauling, Nobel Prize winner, Chemistry


Phony "youth cures"... includes products to soften the skin, to "make the person feel young again," to remove brown spots and cellulite. Of course, there is no product that will work in this way any more than there is a product known to medical science that retards baldness or helps grown hair back on a bald scalp.
- CONGRESSIONAL REPORT ON QUACKERY, 1982



...state licensing boards, particularly for medicine, but also for other professions, have instead become first and foremost devices for protecting the monopolistic position of the professionals.
- Marie Haus, REGULATING THE PROFESSIONS


...an oversupply of doctors threatens... perhaps there is need for professional birth control.
- Journal of the American Medical Association, 1932


As you increase the cost of the license to practice medicine, you increase the price at which the medical service must be sold and you correspondingly decrease the number of people who can afford to buy the service.
- William Allen Pusey, AMA President, 1927


The proportion and absolute number of women physicians was greater in 1910 than in 1950.
- Stanley J. Gross, Professor of Psychology, Indiana State


...the study of medical history indicates that quacks flourish whenever physicians are scarce or when their remedies are ineffective. Licensing laws may actually worsen this problem by artificially restricting the supply of practitioners.
- S. David Young, THE RULE OF EXPERTS


Certification provides all the information of licensure while offering a wider choice set.
- Keith B. Leffler, Journal of Law & Economics