Home
| Calendar
| Mail Lists
| List Archives
| Desktop SIG
| Hardware Hacking SIG
Wiki | Flickr | PicasaWeb | Video | Maps & Directions | Installfests | Keysignings Linux Cafe | Meeting Notes | Linux Links | Bling | About BLU |
On 01/22/2012 06:31 PM, MBR wrote: > Whenever government, be it Federal, state, or local, is given the power > to decide who is allowed to do a particular thing, that power is > inevitably abused to satisfy the demands of some powerful lobbying > group. > But let's get back to professional licenses. The argument for why > government should be able to control who can and who cannot practice a > particular profession is that they're supposedly protecting the public > from incompetents. If a doctor, a lawyer, an electrician, or an > architect screws up, people may well die! Of course, in practice, > licensing boards more often than not protect their own and incompetent > practitioners generally keep their licenses as long as they don't piss > off anyone on the licensing board. So the licensing system doesn't even > accomplish what it claims to. For the record, in nearly all professions requiring licensing/certification, it is not the government that decides who can practice. One of the hallmarks of a discipline being a "profession" is that it is self-regulating; i.e., a governing board or committee for the profession - made up completely of members of the profession - decide on what the appropriate standards of the profession are. (And as a result who is / is not deemed appropriate to practice it.) Nearly all professions work this way - medicine, law, accounting, etc. Government intervention, if it gets involved at all, is generally only limited to things like enforcing that people can't practice the profession without a board-granted license. That said, I'm only correcting what I see as a factual error, and am not staking out a position in the larger debate. (Wisely, I think.) :-) DR
BLU is a member of BostonUserGroups | |
We also thank MIT for the use of their facilities. |