On July 20, 2009 Michael Dwayne Vick walked out of the United States Penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas. Upon serving the remainder of his federal sentence under home confinement and accepting a suspended sentence on state charges, the man identified by the Federal Bureau of Prisons as Prisoner #33765-183 was free.
By August of 2009, though still on probation, Vick had signed a one-year $1.6 million deal with the Philadelphia Eagles. This year, he will earn $5 million more – the best bargain in the NFL. Barring further legal trouble or catastrophic injury, he will make tens of millions more in contractual pay, bonuses, and endorsement deals in the years to come.
All this is fine by me; I think Vick paid his debt to society the moment his sentence was complete. I’m sure others, still sickened by the cruelty Vick inflicted on defenseless animals at the Bad Newz Kennels, will disagree. That’s fine too. In any case, let’s agree that Mike Vick is very, very fortunate. After all, he can throw a football! And he’s fast. And agile. And he’ll be more than amply compensated for those skills. But what if, instead of a hyper-talented professional football player, Michael Vick was a barber?
A visit to the Department of Professional and Occupational Regulation in Vick’s home state of Virginia, will uncover a list of boards governing occupations from barber to hair braider, professional wrestler to interior designer, cemetery operator to time-share salesman. Under Virginia’s relatively liberal licensing regime, a felony conviction will not automatically bar entry to one’s chosen profession. Instead, the regulatory board has the authority to, “refuse a license, certificate or registration if, based upon all the information available, including the applicant’s record of prior convictions, it finds that the applicant is unfit or unsuited to engage in such occupation or profession.” Here things get sticky. What makes an applicant “unfit” for an occupation? In the case of one woman, a repeat DUI conviction was enough for the Real Estate Board to revoke her license and bar her from her chosen profession even after she served her sentence.
The situation is worse in the twenty-six states that have no standards governing the relevance of conviction records of applicants for occupational licenses. Boards can deny applicants on the basis of any conviction. Furthermore, in Virginia, as in many other states, private employers and licensing boards can also inquire about arrests that never led to convictions.
To make matters worse for both potential applicants and consumers, regulatory boards are typically dominated by current occupants of the regulated industries; the licensing decisions are made by actors who have a vested interest in limiting competition and cartelizing their trade. Such behavior was familiar to Adam Smith when he wrote, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” Until recently, potential florists in Louisiana were subject to an exam “in which their own future competitors decide whether they are “good enough” to sell floral arrangement.” In a similar vein, the Louisiana State Board of Embalmers and Funeral Directors is busy protecting state residents from the scourge of unlicensed casket makers in the form of a group of Benedictine monks. In Florida, sheriff’s deputies are busy staging commando-style raids on barber shops.
Some sense of balance is in order. We need better rules governing felon exclusion and occupational licensing in general. Convicted sex-offenders shouldn’t work in day care centers. Fraudsters shouldn’t work as accountants and securities dealers. But what public interest is being served by keeping a former drug pusher or DUI felon from opening a barber shop or tattoo parlor, running a contracting business, braiding hair, or selling homes?
Furthermore, why are so many of these occupations licensed at all? What crimes against good taste are being committed in the states without licensed interior designers? What kind of qualifications is Boston looking for when it regulates fortune tellers? The free market may not be the answer to all of life’s problems, but surely, it’s the answer to some of them. What irreparable harm will come to us in the event of a bad haircut or mismatched flower arrangement? Are cities such as Detroit made better off when large segments of their population are unable to legally start new businesses because of onerous testing requirements, high filing fees, or unrelated felony convictions?
In America, natural talent, ambition, circumstance of birth and luck determine how far we get in pursuit of our dreams. No one is guaranteed success. No one is entitled to a particular job, but we should all be entitled a chance to earn our own way. Even if we can’t throw a football like Michael Vick.
