Over at the Mercatus Center Bridge blog, Trace Mitchell and I just posted an essay entitled, “A Non-Partisan Way to Help Workers and Consumers,” which discusses the new Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) Economic Liberty Task Force report on occupational licensing.

We applaud the FTC’s calls for greater occupational licensing uniformity and portability, but regret the missed opportunity to address root problem of excessive licensing more generally. But while FTC is right to push for greater occupational licensing uniformity and portability, policymakers need to confront the sheer absurdity of licensing so many jobs that pose zero risk to public health & safety. Licensing has become completely detached from risk realities and actual public needs.

As the FTC notes, excessive licensing limits employment opportunities, worker mobility, and competition while also “resulting in higher prices, reduced quality, and less convenience for consumers.” These are unambiguous facts that are widely accepted by experts of all stripes. Both the Obama and Trump Administrations, for example, have been completely in league on the need for comprehensive  licensing reforms.

Trace and I argue that we need serious occupational reforms built on the idea of the “right to earn a living” that must pass this test: “All occupational regulations shall be limited to those demonstrably necessary and carefully tailored to fulfill legitimate public health, safety, or welfare objectives.”  Also, all licensing authorities should be put on the clock and be required, within one year, to reassess the wisdom of all existing licenses to ensure they meet that test. If not, they are repealed or reformed.

In recent testimony in Texas, our Mercatus Center colleague Matthew Mitchell has also discussed other reform options, including the “Occupational Board Reform Act,” which recently passed in Nebraska. The goal of the law is to “protect the fundamental right of an individual to pursue a lawful occupation;.” They key provision of the Act demands that state actors:

use the least restrictive regulation which is necessary to protect consumers from undue risk of present, significant, and substantiated harms that clearly threaten or endanger the health, safety, or welfare of the public when competition alone is not sufficient and which is consistent with the public interest;

That’s an excellent approach to reform and when combined with the Right to Earn a Living Act, policymakers can begin to reverse the protectionist, anti-competitive licensing schemes that encumber entrepreneurs and workers across the land.

In forthcoming work, I hope to more fully develop the connection between the right to earn a living, the need for comprehensive licensing reform, and the freedom to innovate more generally. In the meantime, hop over to The Bridge to read our new essay on how the FTC report helps advance this cause..

This ongoing series has focused on the growing substitutability of Internet-delivered video for traditional video distribution channels like cable and satellite.  YouTube has recently begun exploring adding traditional television programming to its staggering catalogue of mostly amateur-generated content.  

But now YouTube is going one step farther by exploring  the possibility of signing Hollywood professionals to produce “straight-to-YouTube” content:

The deal would underscore the ways that distribution models are evolving on the Internet. Already, some actors and other celebrities are creating their own content for the Web, bypassing the often arduous process of developing a program for a television network. The YouTube deal would give William Morris clients an ownership stake in the videos they create for the Web site.

This kind of deal would make Internet video even more of a substitute for traditional subscription channels—thus further eroding the existing rationale for regulating those channels.  

But what’s even most interesting about this development is that YouTube’s interest seems to be driven primarily by the possibility of reaping greater advertising revenues on such professional content than on its currently reaps from its vast, but relatively unprofitable, catalogue of user-generated content:  

YouTube’s audience is enormous; the measurement firm comScore reported that 100 million viewers in the United States visited the site in October. But, in part because of copyright concerns, the site does not place ads on or next to user-uploaded videos. As a result, it makes money from only a fraction of the videos on the site — the ones that are posted by its partners, including media companies like CBS and Universal Music. The company has shown interest in becoming a home for premium video in recent months by upgrading its video player and adding full-length episodes of television shows. But some major television networks and other media companies are still hesitant about showing their content on the site. The Warner Music Group’s videos were removed from the site last month in a dispute over pay for its content.