Milton Friedman - Who Benefits From Licensing?

I think Milton Friedman had some great (albeit biased) lectures in which he analyzed these issues from a consequentialist libertarian point of view: ▶ this video

in “The Rent-Seeking Is Too Damn High” · View on HN

Careful, "for-profit" healthcare has a lot of government controls on it. Single payer is only obvious after you add a lot of controls to the market. See ▶ this video and the more complete [link] . He explains how regulation eventually results in a centrally planned setup that is less efficient than what used to happen.

in “When Medical Debt Collectors Decide Who Gets Arrested” · View on HN

The issues discussed in the post are about pretty malicious acts, basically writing spyware and malware. I'm not sure how a Professional Engineer exam will really address this. We are mixing in a lot of unrelated things (tests, apprenticeship, etc) to guise what this actually is: a club where existing members are the gate keepers for new members. This is the circular part, it serves the purposes of the members, not the customers -- notice how the users and customers don't figure into any of the 4 steps you mentioned in licensure at all -- they aren't empowered, they are now "protected" by the very same set of people we determined needing wrangling in in the first place. Aside from the trivial chicken and egg problems (who decides the initial PEs? who decides the first exam?), we have the very real concern that the most connected current software engineers in government are precisely the ones that are probably currently breaking the code of ethics (writing malware for national security purposes). This highlights the issue with "self judgment" and makes me incredibly skeptical of the opinions of such a potential licensing committee. Software engineering is not mechanical engineering. There's very little known "for sure", and it doesn't compare to the kind of experience we have building a bridge (there are people who can make really good arguments that mutability is "unsafe" for customers, or that strcpy vs strncpy, or hell, C being used at all). This makes this area ripe for ab

in “Engineering ethics” · View on HN