🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <46549@netnews.upenn.edu> yee@mipgsun.mipg.upenn.edu (Conway Yee) writes:
>Ok, I'll bite.  What's the problem?  Licensing merely mandates a minimum
>level of competency.  Many other professions have licensing procedures
>for exactly that reason.  Would you prefer to be treated by a doctor who
>did not have a license to practice medicine?

If the Doctor was just as competant as an unlicensed one, yes I would
prefer to be treated by one. Of course, he could go to jail for it
under our current laws granting the AMA a monopoly on deciding who can
and can't practice medicine.

In a world without licenses, one might, for instance, decide that you
trust a doctor who graduated from Harvard Medical School, which would
in our hypothetical senario be known for not permitting to graduate
any individual who was incompetant, more than you trust a person
without a degree. There would be no reason you still couldn't sue
people for incompetance, btw.

Licensing isn't meant to protect the public. It is meant to boost the
incomes of the people in the profession by reducing the number of
practitioners (see plumbing licenses, for example -- having grown up
on construction sites, I can tell you that 99% of plumbing work isn't
dangerous or hard, and the remaining percent (mostly gas line work)
isn't hard either.)

Programming is not even a dangerous activity like surgery. Yes,
certainly there are life critical applications, like writing the code
to run operating room equipment, that one would prefer to have written
by competant professionals. However, there are already ways of judging
the competance of those individuals -- companies can choose only to
hire well educated or famous programmers -- and there are already ways
of handling malpractice.

Do you honestly think that a kid in high school should need a license
before writing a Dbase application for his dad's lumber yard? Should I
need a license before writing a shell script to help a buddy do
backups on his network? What sort of unmitigated gall does the state
have to tell me what I can and can't write!

Perry Metzger

-- 
"Live Free or Die!"
For information on the Libertarian Party, call 1-800-682-1776