-By Warner Todd Huston
The State legislature of Nevada wants to be sure your home’s Feng Shui is smooth. New Mexico’s officials want to be sure that your “space” is well arranged. They are all about home decor. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if they have the Home Improvement channel constantly playing in all state offices so that legislators can keep up on the latest tips. They must be experts, fanatically concerned with interior decorating, after all.
Why, you ask?
Well, because they have wasted the time of the legislature and the money of the State’s treasury to make sure that there is a legal, licensed difference between an “Interior Decorator” and just those lowly, unskilled “decorators”. Worse, there is now the iron boot heel of government standing behind the supposed “professional” status of an “Interior Designer” because if you hire someone who claims to be just a “designer” and he does work of an “Interior Designer”– whatever that is supposed to be — well, the black helicopters swoop down upon you, they unleash the hell hounds to run you to ground, and you’ll end up in the deepest pit the State of Nevada can find for up to a year, not to mention fining you $1,000.
That’s right, folks. The State of Nevada wasted its time defining what interior design “means” and has developed a license and fee schedule to control it all.
Things like these are why government at all stages has reached absurdist levels in the USA today. Our Founders waged a Revolution over a tax of a few cents on tea. We, on the other hand, are sitting still while government regulates how we can move our furniture around in our homes, or who we hire to paint a wall.
What are we… MICE or Europeans?
I get this story from George Will’s March 20th column, “Government regulation goes step too far in Nevada”. Will makes some great points with it, too.
Will pegs some of this to the “Interior Design” interests in the western states.
Being able to control the number of one’s competitors, and to dispense the pleasure of status, is nice work if you can get it, and you can get it if you have a legislature willing to enact ”titling laws.” They regulate – meaning restrict – the use of job descriptions. Such laws often are precursors of occupational licensing, which usually means a mandatory credentialing process to control entry into a profession with a particular title.
Will understands rightly that this licensing thing is just a racket set up by certain trade groups who are trying to control their own industry, preventing competition. And some nanny-state politicians who love a “cause”, not to mention the benefits of a trade union or guild that is beholden to them, are happy to comply.
Will spends most of his column on the issue of the quashing of competition among decorating businesses but does briefly bring up another point.
Government licenses professions to protect the public and ensure quality. It licenses engineers and doctors because if their testable skills are deficient, bridges collapse and patients die. The skills of interior designers are neither similarly measurable nor comparably disastrous when deficient.
To me, that is the far more pertinent issue. Where is the Public’s compelling interest in how “professional” someone is in painting a wall, or moving an ottoman? Where is the pressing public good affected by regulations on “Interior Designers”?
Indemnity insurance is another thing, of course, and that is a compelling interest of the law. But why is it any business of the government if someone can color coordinate your carpet with your drapes? The fact that state governments even assume such power is indicative of the overweening, nanny state into which we have slid.
And every state has idiotic laws like these, not just the western states. In the dead of night, these politicians with pockets full of IOUs from one industry or another pass these kinds of boondoggle laws meant solely to scratch the backs of pals and serving no legitimate interests of the State. And, as each year passes on we are more enslaved to government than ever before through overarching regulation.
Thomas Jefferson said that the blood of tyrants and patriots should water the tree of liberty every so often. We have long since passed the time when our Founders would have found government intolerable.
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Warner Todd Huston’s thoughtful commentary, sometimes irreverent often historically based, is featured on many websites such as newsbusters.org, townhall.com, men’snewsdaily.com and americandaily.com among many, many others. Additionally, he has been a guest on several radio programs to discuss his opinion editorials and current events. He has also written for several history magazines and appears in the new book “Americans on Politics, Policy and Pop Culture” which can be purchased on amazon.com. He is also the owner and operator of publiusforum.com. Feel free to contact him with any comments or questions : EMAIL Warner Todd Huston
My name is Bruce Goff and I was the President of the coalition of Interior Designers in Nevada who worked for and passed the law you and Mr. Will are writing about. But here is an angle I bet you never had information on. This law actually increases the publics choice about who does work for them. It improves competition not reduces it. It actually allowed those that went though the state hurdles to do more, it did not remove things from those designers that chose to not go through the process.
Remember that 69″ armoire that George mentioned? Before the law giving Interior Designers a scope of work legally the only person who could have said where it went would have been an architect.
The idea that registration limits those that don’t register is simply not true.
Mr. Goff,
Thanks for your message (and I have posted your reply on my bolg).
I must say that I do not blame you or the Interior Design industry. After all, it IS our system to gather in what might amount to a Guild or Union of sorts and to go before our elected representatives to lobby for our interests. You did exactly as you should have done in the American system.
However, it is up to our representatives to operate with an eye toward that system as well, not merely to bow to pressures that might benefit himself… or even “the people”, necessarily.
What you say about increasing the public’s choices could well be true. But it is still NOT in the State’s compelling interests. It is incumbent upon the legislature to know WHEN a State should create laws and regulations and in this case, it is my firm belief that they have crossed over the line of American freedoms and into Nanny Stateism.
Thanks for your communication.
WTH