The Licensing Racket

A bottom-up investigation of the broken system of professional licensing, affecting everyone from hairdressers and morticians to doctors, lawyers, real estate agents, and those who rely on their services.

Millions of Americans are required to have a license to do their jobs, giving the boards responsible for licensure enormous power. In theory, licensing boards maintain standards of hygiene, skill, and ethics, but their decisions can be maddeningly arbitrary, creating unnecessary barriers to work. And where boards could actually curb harms and ensure professionalism, their performance is disappointing.

When Rebecca Haw Allensworth began attending board meetings, she discovered a thicket of self-dealing and ineptitude. The Licensing Racket goes behind the scenes to show how boards protect insiders from competition and bad actors from discipline. Even where there is the will to investigate complaints, boards lack the resources to do so. Consequences range from the banal—a hairdresser prevented from working—to the shocking, with medical licensing boards bearing considerable blame for the opioid crisis and for staffing shortages during COVID. Unethical lawyers, meanwhile, are rarely stripped of licenses.

If licensing is a pointless obstacle to employment in many arenas, in others it is as important as it is ineffective. Allensworth argues for abolition where appropriate and outlines an agenda for reform where it is most needed.