Skip to main content

Lack of Action from Oklahoma’s Occupational Licensing Advisory Commission

Apparently, if you’re a legislator in Oklahoma and want to look like you’re doing something about an issue while not actually doing anything at all, you pass a bill to create a commission to study the issue. At least, that’s how the Oklahoma Occupational Licensing Advisory Commission (LAC) has operated so far.

According to a study I did while at the Goldwater Institute, Oklahoma ranked as the 24th most-licensed state. A study by the Institute for Justice ranked Oklahoma 35th in how broadly and onerous its licensing laws are. But these, and similar studies, are really just counts of how many occupations states license, so they leave out a lot of nuance.

The Institute for Justice’s report does add some nuance, reporting that by its standard of measure, Oklahoma ranks 18th in how burdensome are its licensing laws. That is an important piece of information. On the one hand, according to the Institute for Justice, Oklahoma’s licensing laws cover fewer occupations than in many states, but on the other hand, those laws are so egregious that Oklahoma still ranks worse than 32 states in how burdensome its licensing laws are.

And that is exactly what six different analysts at the 1889 Institute have found again and again. We have looked at eleven licensed occupations in Oklahoma, and in nearly every case, we have found that in some respect, Oklahoma’s licensing laws impose the most onerous requirements among the states. For example, Oklahoma is one of only a few states requiring a social worker to have a college degree, even as the state struggles to fill social worker positions. Not only is Oklahoma one of only 15 states that licenses locksmiths, it is the only state that requires locksmiths to be 21 years old. Ours is the only state that requires an electrologist to have a college degree. No state requires more education of funeral directors and embalmers than Oklahoma, though some require less. Colorado does not license them at all.

Yet, in this year’s LAC recommendations, no changes were recommended to Oklahoma’s social worker licensing laws and only alarm salesperson licensing was recommended to be eliminated from the state’s locksmith licensing law. We criticized hair braider licensing in Oklahoma’s cosmetology licensing law; its elimination was the only recommendation from LAC with respect to barber and cosmetology licensing. Yet, of the eleven licensed occupations we have reviewed, none of these licensing laws have been found necessary according to the rubric we have established, one not unlike that which LAC uses. Nonetheless, LAC has not recommended getting rid of any of them.

In fact, at the most recent meeting of LAC, the chair, Labor Commissioner Leslie Osborn seemed more interested in placing more requirements on cosmetologists than doing anything to free markets and expand opportunity. And speaking of opportunity, LAC members had none when it came to establishing a rapport with members of the general public who testified, due to some bad advice about how the state’s open meetings law works. That bad advice, that a commission member having a public conversation with someone testifying on-topic was not allowed, was given by, you guessed it, a licensed attorney.

Byron Schlomach is Director of the 1889 Institute and can be reached at bschlomach@1889institute.org.


Popular posts from this blog

The Truth About COVID-19: Better Than You Think

As the media turns its attention back to COVID-19, there is a renewed push to shut down the economy. Some states have even begun to scale back reopening plans for their economies; others continue to delay opening. It is essential to look past their catastrophizing and focus on the facts of COVID-19. One fact to consider: while testing has risen 23%, the rate of positive results has only risen 1.3 percentage points to 6.2%. Even as alarmists point to the rise in cases, they still admit that the boost in testing has played a role in the rise in the total number of known cases. Therefore, the total number of positive cases is not of much use in this case, as it only paints a partial picture. The rate of increase in total positive cases is a more meaningful measure, and it has barely increased. Even more important is who is getting infected. The data show that recent cases are primarily younger people. But that’s a good thing; these are precisely the people that are key to building herd ...
Read more

Welfare of Oklahoma’s Children Panned In Flawed “Study”

Are Oklahoma’s children underprivileged? According to a recently published list by Wallethub, which attempted to rank states with the most underprivileged children, Oklahoma is the 7th worst. However, if the goal was to help states improve their policies, or to show parents what states to avoid, the authors might have done better to provide sources for their data (outside the lists Wallethub had already compiled), and more importantly, choose better metrics. The authors don’t provide much context or support for why their chosen metrics matter, or how they could be changed. Of course, the goal might just be clicks.   The study is divided into three sections: Socio-economic welfare (50 points), health (25 points), and education (25 points). Each is evaluated based on Wallethub ’ s list of arbitrary metrics and then assigned a weighted score. These are then combined to get the final overall “ underprivileged” score. But are these scores worthwhile?   Socio-economic Welfare Share...
Read more

How Biden/Harris and Well-educated Sophisticates Are Wrong in the Age of COVID-19

Vice President-elect Kamala Harris often declared during the campaign that “We believe in science.” And judging by the tendency of the college-educated , especially among the sophisticates living on the coasts, to agree with Harris’s positions on everything from climate change to proper precautions amid COVID-19, belief in “science” seems to many a mark of knowledge and wisdom. But is it? The modern belief in “science” increasingly appears to be a religion wherein the words of certain recognized experts are received with the reverence once reserved for the Pope. A college diploma almost serves as a permission slip to suspend one’s own judgment and reason in favor of taking the word of certain experts to heart, especially if they work in government, certain universities, or gain media credence.   This tendency to turn experts and the media into high priests of all knowledge is nothing new. In 1986, 60 Minutes ran a story about a phenomenon people experienced in cars with automatic...
Read more

Present Reforms to Keep the Ghost of State Questions Past from Creating Future Headaches

Oklahoma, like many western states, allows its citizens to directly participate in the democratic process through citizen initiatives and referendums. In a referendum, the legislature directs a question to the people — usually to modify the state constitution, since the legislature can change statutes itself. An initiative requires no legislative involvement, but is initiated by the people via signature gathering, and can be used to modify statute or amend the constitution. Collectively, the initiatives and referendums that make it onto the ballot are known as State Questions.   Recently, there have been calls to make it more difficult to amend the constitution. At least two proposals are being discussed. One would diversify the signature requirement by demanding that a proportional amount of signatures come from each region of the state. The other would require a sixty percent majority to adopt a constitutional amendment rather than the fifty percent plus one currently in place. ...
Read more