"Doug Miller" wrote in message ...

No, it's not. If a real estate broker or accountant or lawyer screws up
and
costs you a lot of money, you sue him and recover your money. If a doctor
screws up and ruins your health, you can't sue him and recover your
health.

Training and certification are a good way of preventing the damage in the
first place. No, that doesn't mean I figure a kid should need a license to
set up a lemonade stand. But I sure check the license of any contractor I'm
considering hiring, and I wouldn't hire one who didn't have a license. Your
insistence that monetary damages are not serious enough to be prevented by
licensing sounds ideological than practical.

You didn't lose anything that can't be replaced. That's the crucial
difference
that you seem determined to fail to understand.

What do you figure the odds are that a contractor who neglected to be
licensed has insurance? Why is it a reasonable thing to require me to chase
him for years in hopes of maybe getting paid for my loss? Wouldn't it be
better to require contractors to be licensed, with insurance a condition of
being licensed?

So let the insurance companies deal with it. Keep the government out of
it.

There are reasons why govt. is the preferred entity for licensing, not the
least of which is the lack of profit as a motive to influence how they
administer licensing. I'll go out on a limb and guess you're not well
disposed towards trade unions being able to charge people to work at a
particular job, but now you're in effect arguing on behalf of people needing
to pay a private company to get the license they need to work. What happens
when a company in the industry being regulated buys the insurance company
that issues the licenses, are we to believe they wouldn't dream of using
that to their advantage? Look what happened with the bond rating agencies
on Wall St., because they were being paid huge sums of money to rate
extremely complex securities and despite the fact that they knew they
couldn't actually gauge the value of those securities they nonetheless
stamped them triple-A--profit was more important than honest certification.
I want to know a commercial truck driver beside me on the highway got his
license because he passed the test, not because the private licensing
company is cranking out licenses to unqualified drivers in search of profit.

I never claimed there were arguments against requiring doctors to be
licensed;
in fact, I acknowledged that there *is* a compelling public safety
interest in
doing so.

Your insistence that there is no public interest unless blood is spilled is
ludicrous, most of the civilized world has moved past such a position. Do I
think licensing can be taken too far? Of course I do, but I also believe
your contention that life and limb have to be threatened before we can
justify licensing is simplistic and dogmatic.

Ever get a makeup brush jabbed in your eye? No? Well then, you aren't
qualified to speak to the horrors of unlicensed makeup artists running
amuck
leaving chaos in their wake.

GMAFB. Can't you do any better than that?

It was a joke, loosen up before you give yourself a stroke.