In article ,
"DGDevin" wrote:



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 would do all that, heck, I do, too. But I am not suggesting that
my desires be placed on everyone. If someone wants to roll the dice why
should that be the government's decision?


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?

And yet the licensing boards every month or so pull a license
because of no insurance. It is a condition of having a car in Indiana
that you have insurance, but many people still don't. My experience is
that licensure is by no means a guarantee. Few places that I know of
track insurance so a person could get insurance, get a license, and then
let it lapse w/o anybody knowing.



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.
You're kidding right? There is plenty of profit motive and you see
it all the time. The city councilman gets a little boost in
contributions for making it a little harder to get a plumber's license,
all the way up to the Congressman. The staff wants to go from licensing
board job to a job in industry. Every licensing board I am familiar with
has at least a majority of the board from the industry itself.

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.
Look what happened with the "highly" regulated banks themselves.
They went to Congresscritters (of both parties) and paid them off
(profit) by power, schmoozing, or campaign contributions. If the
government types (over about 15 years or so) had done their job, the
rating agencies sins would have superfulous. Your trust in the
government is almost touching.

--
People thought cybersex was a safe alternative,
until patients started presenting with sexually
acquired carpal tunnel syndrome.-Howard Berkowitz