Imagine that.

Hush, Bookworm, I’m totally infatuated with you and value the opportunity to read you daily. But I wouldn’t hire you in a million years.

BW - it’s so easy to ignore…

I was reading somewhere - no idea where - not long ago about the “lawyer tax” we all pay for everything. Pretty amazing. It’s a lot more than the extra penny Coke and Pepsi have to charge. Lawyer costs are built into everything.

Back in my active shrink days I had to go listen to (and even occasionally teach!) a few hours of blather every year. This was, in that profession, part of the lawyer tax, too. (If you didn’t have the latest “specialized knowledge” and something went wrong somewhere, you were instantaneously sued, and if the course was missing from your resume, your insurance would have the excuse to also arrange to be missing.)

So you were free to wonder: was this about improving your abilities, or making sure your resume looked okay to avoid being sued? Which was more important: avoidance of lawyers, or better performance? Was there substance to this - or just looks?

Now - there was of course always at least SOME substance. But whether or not it related to your specialty was entirely irrelevant to your need to be there. You just had to be there, period.

So mostly it was about avoidance of lawyers. Another form of lawyer tax.

The fact, Carol, that lawyers walk out illustrates precisely how they understand that their presence confers no benefit on them — it’s a sham. And what I object to, strenuously, is when the government imposes on a profession, not for any real benefit, but simply to create some sort of illusion — that lawyers are competent, perhaps, or that government is “watching.” As to that last point, government may be “watching,” but there’s no benefit from this scrutiny — scrutiny, of course, that comes at a cost that is inevitably passed on to the ultimate consumer.

Perhaps if there was more indication that the government took the whole thing more seriously, I’d be less convinced that it’s nothing more than a scam. In the medical profession, for example, doctors have to get relicensed regularly in their field. That is, their CLE classes must be put to real use if they wish to continue. Here, all I need to do is pay — not learn, just pay — and I’m in. That’s why it’s a sham, and probably unlike CLE in other fields (which, if I recall, is precisely the argument opponents of California’s MCLE made when the idea was first put on the table in the mid-1980s).

One time I took an all-day seminar put on by the local bar association. By the end of the day, you could easily tell who the lawyers weren’t because all the lawyers had left. Turns out all the lawyers had to do do get their credit was show up and sign in; no evidence needed that they actually stuck around. We lowly insurance agents, though, had to sign in and sign out to get our credits.

2. Goldberg got the stuff about business liking regulation and occupational licensing from Mises who pointed this out long ago. Occupational licensing, i.e., the bar association, is always, always, always started by the profession to be licensed. It is always sold as a way to protect consumers, which is pure unadulterated bullcrap, because it is always, always, always a means to limit entry into a profession and therefore to raise the incomes of those grandfathered into the licensing scheme.