on the other hand
John mines a few laughs and a salient point from a story about the attempt to regulate yoga. And, it’s true, that story’s pretty funny, and I think John is on the right track with his implied complaints.
Let’s look at a less laugh-inducing example, though: personal trainers. There are no consistent and widely used standards to indicate that a personal trainer knows what he or she is doing. There’s dozens of certifications that are close to meaningless because there’s no real regulatory body maintaining the standard and saying “yeah, this person knows what he’s doing.” Some of the different certifications are given out by people who are pretty rigorous about it; some you can simply pay a fee and get a piece of paper over the Internet. Sometimes, you have both for the same kind of certification, so that one person actually went through an intensive course to get the certification, and someone else just printed it out. The effect is the same; people shopping around for a personal trainer end up looking at sometimes dozens of different types of certification and having no possibly way to make an informed choice.
And there are serious consequences for consumers. Google around a little and you can find hundreds of horror stories– trainers who led their clients to tear their ACLs or break vertebra or rip muscles. There have been a few deaths. The fact that there’s no kind of regulatory body at all and no consistent standards ensures that consumers can’t make informed choices, and that leads to injury. Clearly, even if there were regulations concerning what kind of training and testing was necessary to sell your services as a personal trainer, that wouldn’t obviate the need for consumers to do their homework. You’d still want to look around, to search the Internet, talk to references, etc. But just like the existence of formal regulations for medical doctors ensures (with a vanishingly small number of exceptions do to out-and-out fraud) that the doctor you see will at least have met a certain minimum level of schooling and testing, so some kind of organized, national certification process for personal trainers could help people to choose a personal trainer with at least some confidence.
Yoga isn’t exactly the same, and I wouldn’t want the same kind of certification rules for yoga instructors as for personal trainers. In fact I don’t think that regulation of yoga really makes sense at all, although clearly I’m little qualified to say. The point is, though, that regulation of personal training, at least, is worthy of discussion, and as it’s an issue of protecting people from actual physical harm, I don’t think its passage would signal some sort of creep towards a nightmare regulatory state. Incidentally, regulations that protect people from bodily harm are what a lot of people actually want most from government, and expect most from government, save for the police and firefighting. People like being able to walk into a public building and knowing that there is an assurance from government that it won’t fall down on their heads, or that the electricity won’t suddenly cause a wall to burst into flames.
That’s not the end of the story for whether or not regulating personal trainers is overall worthwhile or consistent with our vision of liberty. But I think it should caution us against taking too broad a view of regulation in the first place; not all regulation is the product of regulatory capture or of bureaucratic inertia. With regulation the devil is always in the details. I’m as opposed to stupid, corrupt or ineffective regulation as anyone. I just want to preserve regulation that is in the public interest. (Which I think John would entirely agree with.)
So I might say more about this later, but for now I’ll just remark quickly that two of the most obvious downsides of state-enforced licensing requirements for physical trainers would be:
1. It becomes harder and more costly to get into the line of work.
2. Thanks to (1), hiring a physical trainer costs more.
Plus, it’s obviously an open question whether the official standards would actually work to their desired ends; the key thing to note, though, is that the above consequences would fall most heavily on the already disadvantaged.Report
I don’t think you should have to have a license to show someone how to work out; that’s unenforceable, even if we wanted to do that. Consumers want there to be such a thing as a licensed personal trainer so that they have a little peace of mind that the person they hired knows what he or she is doing. Trainers want to be able to be licensed so that they can use that as a selling point. What exists now is a chaos of different certifications and licenses which don’t mean anything to most people, and which aren’t even enforced with the same standards within the same certifications. Many personal trainers claim to be certified when what they have amounts to a piece of paper they made in Microsoft Paint.
What I’d like is that, if you want to have your cousin train you on the side, and you’re comfortable with that, go for it; we couldn’t possible enforce it if we wanted to stop that sort of thing. But if people want to use a licensed trainer, knowing it’s more expensive, and if trainers want to get licensed in order to give people more assurance about their capabilities, and thus charge more, we should have some sort of consistent standards. And as the industry is most certainly not providing such standards now, I think it’s sensible to ask government to create such licensing standards.Report
So you’re in effect saying that there should be no requirements for licensure to work as a personal trainer, but if you want to be a Licensed Personal Trainer, there should be some guide for that? That seems reasonable, though I’d say it should be a state-level license, not federal.
Then again, it seems that once you start moving in this direction you get more and more of a push for requiring burdensome licensing across the board. Florists, for instance, need to be certified in most states, as do hair-stylists. This means expensive schooling for people who may not even need it. It is expensive and doesn’t really guarantee a good hair-cut any more than the markets would. It seems that once you start opening these doors, getting government involved, you really have a hard time turning back the clock.
And quite frankly, I’d rather have my tax dollars going toward cops and schools and fixing pot-holes.Report
What Erik said. In practice, official licensing guidelines mean state-enforced licensure requirements, which is why I’m disallowed from taking money for my services as an amateur interior designer across much of the U.S.Report
“Florists, for instance, need to be certified in most states, as do hair-stylists. This means expensive schooling for people who may not even need it. It is expensive and doesn’t really guarantee a good hair-cut…”
I don’t know about florists, but I believe hairdressers are licensed because they work with toxic substances. It’s a matter of safety, not of assuring you get a nice bob.
Everybody (?) agrees that doctors, nurses and other medical technicians need to be licensed. The issue is the same–safety. The question when it comes to people like trainers is whether the dangers posed by not licensing them are, as with the case of medical personnel, sufficiently serious to merit government involvement.Report
But this isn’t actually the case. Virginia Postrel has examined African hair braiders in New York, who do NOT use toxic substances (or really “substances” at all), but who still have to learn how to style caucasian hair. A licensing regime may start out with the best of intentions, but once it’s established, the licensed practitioners are going to do everything they can to prevent others’ entry.Report
I believe that barbers are licensed because they used to perform minor surgery such as lancing boils. This and the prevalence of conditions like ringworm and lice, gave the state a real interest in seeing to their training and antisepses. As for hairdressers, I suspect that you are right regarding chemicals.Report
Freddie, as soon as we create a group of “liscenced personal trainers” who have incurred expense and effort to get the government to certify them as such we have then created an interest group who have strong incentive to lobby for the government to make it increasingly difficult for people outside said group to offer similar services. And government rarely needs much convincing to expand their reach. We’ve seen it in virtually every industry or service that regulation has ever descended upon.
I know that let the buyer beware is tough, but there’s nothing preventing the injured buyer from launching a devastating lawsuit against the malificent trainer and damnit we have to stop somewhere? We can -always- find unfortunates in every group and service to use as a banner for increased regulation. It’s just “Won’t somebody think of the children!?!?” in different words.Report
I’m not sure I understand your distinction between yoga, which is a strength and cardio exercise, and personal training. They’re essentially the same thing. You can hurt yourself with yoga, just as easily as if you were working with weights or doing intensive cardio. If you’re going to argue that you should license and regulate personal training, yoga should go with that too.Report
Sorry, I meant to comment on the main post.Report
But how much is the actual cost of entry. At some level shouldn’t there be a cost of entry to a field?Report
First, I’d challenge the distinction between personal training and yoga. Many yoga regimens can be quite intense and athletic.
But second, I’d suggest that this line of argument may be defending regulation by anecdote. It’s easy to find people who were injured by personal trainers. Liberty interests aside, and speaking strictly about costs and benefits to public health, “some people get injured” isn’t an argument in favor of regulation — we need to know that the regulations will actually prevent the injuries (not always easy), and that the removal of many personal trainers from the market will not adversely affect public health — causing more illness and injury than it prevents.Report