Our friends at the Institute for Justice have produced a new report on occupational licensing. This is something that Milton Friedman often criticized as an unfair effort by incumbents in a particular profession to raise their own pay by reducing competition.
According to this chart, New Mexico licenses approximately half (52) of what IJ calls “low-income occupations.” This is somewhat above average in terms of over-regulation. These are not doctors and lawyers, rather, many of the professions are as simple as being an interior designer, hairdresser, or some other profession that cannot harm anyone even if performed poorly.
Look for more from the Rio Grande Foundation on the issue of unnecessary government regulation in the near future. Also, there is a great video on the issue below:
Not only does NM license all manner of unnecessarily-licensed business (merely in order to collect money from them) but when a customer of one of them actually tries to use the appropriate state regulatory agency to enforce the alledged terms of their permit, the customer finds out there is always some loophole in the regulatory law that allows the business to escape accountability for their actions. So the regulation is once again a farce.
It happened to me: I stuck my car in a ditch in Santa Fe, called a wrecker, he was about to hook on and pull me out, when his hook and heavy ball-weight on it, swung into my windshield, cracking it. “Oh no problem” the guy says. “My insurance will take care of it”. Well, he HAD NO INSURANCE, even though it was required by his NMSCC issued license. When I complained to the NMSCC, I was told that “He only runs a wrecker service inside the city limits of Santa Fe, so he doesn’t need a State-issued permit”. He wouldn’t talk to me at that point so I consulted a lawyer who advised me to just file a claim with MY insurance company, which paid to replace my windshield. So, I was out the wrecker fee (which I had to pay in cash before he started his “work), and my insurance company raised MY rate the following year because I had a claim.
NM is an over-taxed, non-regulated, consumer nightmare state with a bunch of non-working state government drones filching tax money out of the citizens and doing nothing except wasting it on themselves and their bloated agencies. Banana Republic is the term best suited to this non member of the 50 states of the union. Bunch of crooks.