Instead of barring Black people, let anyone practice law
How the GOP could actually help working-class Americans
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Hoes (Fox News) mad that Delaware is lowering the passing score on the bar exam in order to increase racial diversity.
"The bar exam is not supposed to be a barrier to entering the profession,” said Chief Justice Collins J. Seitz Jr. who Fox News reports began the diversity project that led to a report that suggested changes.
Well actually, my friend, licensure and certification requirements are absolutely supposed to be barriers to entering professions. That’s their entire purpose.
“The bar exam...literally is ‘supposed to be a barrier,’” Wilfred Reilly tweeted in response. “You can die if your lawyer is a moron.” True as that may be, licensure and certification requirements across hundreds of occupations do not guarantee competent service. These requirements demonstrably don’t improve health and safety.
What they do guarantee is that consumers pay more for the same service and that many otherwise talented people aren’t allowed to do these jobs.
Listen, if you want to hire a lawyer who’s passed the bar exam, which is administered by what is functionally a lawyer’s guild whose purpose is to limit the number of practicing attorneys to keep lawyer salaries high, you should be able to.
But it should be your Goddess-given right to use case histories, reviews, and word-of-mouth to choose an attorney rather than a guild’s permission system if you want to.
Keep in mind this same guild fought to prevent non-lawyers from working on discovery, if I remember correctly. And they’re pushing back against plea bargaining for the same reason. More work, and more money, for lawyers.
What if conservatives took this indignation at the inherently political process of deciding who is and isn’t allowed by law to perform a service and turned it toward getting rid of these laws entirely? Rather than saying “Let’s keep the bar (pun intended) high to keep Black people out” why not instead say “Let more people do this job so the best people rise to the top, more people get to do it, and everyone pays less?”
My acquaintance Markose Butler recently pointed out in The Hill that Democrats should take aim at occupational licensure requirements to win over Black voters. The left likes that it helps marginalized people disproportionately.
But there’s no reason this should only be a Democratic priority. It’s just as much a fundamentally small-government, pro-freedom, economic-growth-promoting policy position. New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, a Republican, recently announced plans to “fully remove 34 different outdated licenses from state government” and eliminate “14 underutilized regulatory boards.”
But overall, there seems to be more enthusiasm for cutting through the government red tape preventing people from working and keeping prices high for consumers on the left than the right.
Isn’t the left is supposed to be for rich, well-educated coastal elites while the right is for heartland, working class Americans? Why then, when push comes to shove, is the right waging war on trans people, drag brunches, and other culture-war nonsense rather than getting the working class back to work?
Seems like a major opportunity to me.
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