This is the Katery Daily podcast for Monday, December 9th, 2024.

I'm Caleb Brown.

State-level licensing of occupations dampens economic performance, and just about every state

has significant work to do, freeing workers from those needless government mandates.

Ed Timmons runs the

NEE regulatory research center. He says a few key reforms could deliver big dividends for

consumers and providers alike and make their states more prosperous along the way.

You know, the stat is thrown around often by people from on our side of this issue,

which is once upon a time it was something like one in ten occupations were licensed,

and now it's closer to one in three.

And over time, it has just become accepted that government would either directly regulate the people who are allowed to operate within certain professions, or they would delegate it out to often incumbent practitioners in a certain area to decide the appropriate number of people to practice a certain occupation.

You've put together an index, and that has been ongoing for a while now.

What do we know broadly about how states have attempted to regulate various occupations and which states

have, in our view, seen the light on doing so? Yeah, so I think one key takeaway that we've learned

is that there's big differences across states with respect to occupations

that are licensed. There were seven occupations that we found in our report that were licensed

in just one state. And not all the same state, right? That's right. That's right. And, you know,

interestingly, you know, one state that I think a lot of the time gets touted for

doing very well in terms of economic freedom, the state of Texas, they performed most poorly.

So we found that they licensed more occupations than any other state in our index.

And the gap between Texas, which we found licensed 199 occupations out of the

284 that we looked at, Kansas licenses only 136 of them. So pretty significant difference from the top,

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