Today, our hero rides his hobbyhorse off a cliff (no news on whether he was tweeting about his border collie at the time):
Meanwhile, though “torts and the free market will take care of it” isn’t the answer to everything, it’s surely the answer to some things. Getting some kind of training before you shave a dude with a straight razor is obviously desirable in terms of strict self-interest. If you screw it up in a serious way, you’ll face serious personal consequences and the only way to make money doing it—and we’re talking about a very modest sum of money—is to do it properly.Right, because tort law a great way of dealing with minor, frequent injuries. Surely everyone who suffers a burned scalp, nicked throat, lice infestation, or other predictable harm is going to plunk down thousands of dollars to sue his barber for a couple hundred bucks' worth of medical expenses. For "serious personal consequences" to come into play, the unlicensed barber would have to kill or badly injure a customer: A rare enough event that even a blithering incompetent (especially a blithering incompetent) might discount the likelihood of it ever happening to him. You can't count on market forces to force idiots to behave safely.
And speaking of markets, is there any actual evidence of anticompetitive price-gouging that is the "obvious" outcome of licensing? Ydiot has his coif trimmed for a mere $13. Considering that a cut takes 25 minutes and is performed in a wildly expensive real estate market, I can reliably estimate that my barber is probably starving to death. I'm not getting ripped off. The problems our hero highlights simply do not exist.
Oh, and later our hero mentions the UK, which doesn't license barbers, but does have extremely strict health and safety rules for all businesses. False analogy, bucko.
Posts
He's Chunky Megan McArdle.
ReplyDeleteDoes he have an eye on a position at the Cato Institute?
ReplyDeleteAs much as Yglesias is kind of an idiot, you're putting words in his mouth and not responding to his additional point, which is that the market will tend to produce competent barbers without a regulatory system in place. He says "screw up in a serious way" while you address "minor, frequent injuries." Do we need a vast regulatory apparatus to prevent nicks and cuts? It seems like a barber that is not good at cutting hair will be punished by the market, just like in any other service industry. Do we need to regulate and provide government-approved training for every single service one human can provide to another? It also seems like people were able to get their hair cut safely for a long time prior to the establishment of hair cutting guilds (which is all that licensing and training requirements are about).
ReplyDeleteHow do you know you're not getting ripped off? Without the pricing enabled by the government enforced barriers to entry, we don't know what prices would be. My guess is they would come down, since there would be a much lower cost of compliance with the various regulations. But maybe that's not obvious.
Yglesias is an idiot, but as far as stupidity goes, this doesn't quite measure up. Lice are disgusting but not fatal, and it's easy to treat. It's not quite like seat-belts in cars. Licensed or not, any lice outbreak that gets traced back to a barber is going to kill that business permanently.
ReplyDeletell right, all right, all right. Will you guys back off if I admit it's not as bad as the sink-airplanes-off-the-coast-of-China idea?
ReplyDeleteStill, I'm a betting man, and I'd wager that deregulation would bring more minor injuries of the variety that require stitches or burn treatments. Not bad enough for a lawsuit, but bad enough. The process of weeding out (like the eponymous song) would go on forever and suck. And prices are already low -- in this real estate market, $13 barely covers 25 minutes' worth of rent and air conditioning. I suspect I'm getting my money's worth with that licensing board.
So good arguments, but if you're expecting me to admit even the teensiest error, please disabuse yourself of that notion straightaway: I am never wrong, and I am no liar.
Cheers,
The Ydiot
T.R.'s argument was especially good.
ReplyDeleteThis post (and the last) does a lot to demonstrate why this blog is a fascinating train wreck. Yeah, Yglesias blogs all the time about shit he doesn't know anything about and, as a result, he says all kinds of stupid thing (and this pretense about his superior ability to detect 'logical errors' is hilariously self unaware). But in your effort to generate content you wind up replicating his major error: blogging about things about which you appear to be really ignorant. What does requiring someone to take 50 hours of "soft curls" training have to do with preventing lice? I don't think Yglesias is arguing against health inspections -- he's arguing against forcing people to take unnecessary classes and lengthy forced "apprenticeships" -- to become gainfully employed in low-skill jobs. If you bother to read the law he's referencing in the original post -- he even links to it! -- you'd see how over-broad and ridiculous most of the licensing requirements are.
ReplyDeleteHey, buddy, we never said there shouldn't be a blog out there dedicated to criticizing this blog. The advantage of this model? Scale. Get to it! It's not like I can write it myself.
ReplyDeleteAnd you're lucky I'm not feeling petty, or I might point out that you're toppling a straw man. I'm pro-licensing for safety reasons, and I think the surfeit of cheap-ass available haircuts demonstrates that the regulatory hurdle isn't breaking the market. But of course I'm against the stupid stuff. I'm against all stupid things.