Free Market

Zipline, the latest drone delivery service to launch in Salt Lake City, is unlike the rest. Instead of a four-prop quadcopter that hovers in place, Zipline drones look more like airplanes with a fixed wing design that weighs up to forty pounds and can travel over fifty miles. 
Low wages and lack of no upward mobility. Sound familiar? While these are the current complaints behind the restaurant service worker shortage, they aren’t new.
Ryan Crownholm, who owns and operates MySitePlan.com, was issued a $1,000 citation and asked to suspend his business operations after a California professional licensing board claimed that Crownholm and his company illegally practiced land surveying without a state-mandated occupational license. 
Licensing restrictions are housed in individual states' statutory or administrative laws. At first, these seemingly innocent laws appear to simply define what a specific occupation is and what a practitioner of the occupation may do as well as establish conditions for entry into an occupation. However, there is a sinister side to occupational licensing.
The birthplace of a person bears little to no relationship on that individual’s ability to dutifully carry out the requirements of various professional roles. Yet for years, many states have utilized citizen status as a barrier to keep individuals from obtaining state-mandated occupational licenses. 
Libertas has long documented the detrimental effects of occupational licensing. This form of government regulation stifles economies and creates a stringent, artificial class system via economic protectionism. Unfortunately, in conversations relating to reforming occupational licensing laws, many overlook solutions outside of simply slashing various licensing requirements.

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