Licenses are a measure to control, not protect.

In a number of professions, you need the government’s permission to operate. A lawyer, for instance, can only practice as a lawyer if he fulfills the state’s requirements, like a J.D. degree from a school the state approves of. A doctor can’t do his job as a doctor unless he has the state’s signature on his license. The government quite literally has to give you a work permit before you can do these jobs. This practice is tyranny which the Christian may (and often must) tolerate, but which he cannot righteously endorse.

Licensure, in theory, allows us to be sure that the person doing high-skill jobs is actually capable of doing that job. That’s why it needs government enforcement, in areas like medicine and law. But while that may be the sales pitch for licensure, it’s not the reason they came into being, historically. The history of licensure, stretching back to the guild era, is of local practitioners of a trade banding together and getting governmental power to enforce their monopoly.

Now, I’ve not the slightest problem with guilds, so long as they keep honesty, avoid destructive competition (such as leveraging scale to undersell temporarily in order to drive out otherwise superior competition), and, most importantly, keep away from using the civil government’s power. A guild, properly positioned, provides the buyers with seals of quality, assurance that what they buy is worth buying, and allows for better training, as well as better community.

The problem is when the guild or the profession’s elites (typically the latter, in the modern day) get ahold of government power and start using it to enforce their monopoly. That’s when a guild or a profession becomes a cartel. Nowadays, this can mean price fixing, but more commonly it means that the governmental body attached to the profession can filter who gets in for their worldview, can push out those whose dissent becomes too effective, unless they’re very careful. The input filtering, note, is integral to the modern system: you have to go through the university system, a set of institutions immensely corrupt and generally dedicated to the evil worldview which pervades modern government.

Licensure is also a political weapon. John Eastman, for instance, gave legal counsel to then-VP Mike Pence (a politician none should trust), for which grand crime he has been disbarred by the state of California (Trump, of course, is nowhere to be found. Why should he defend the lawyer who worked against the 2020 election theft?). California did not have an professional-ethics or qualitative reason to attack Eastman; they had only their moral hatred of his siding with then-President Trump, his giving of an arguable but plausible interpretation of the Constitution. Yet they disbarred him- and a qualified lawyer is forbidden from practicing in California because he disagreed with the government.

Besides all this, licensure is wrong in principle. Nowhere in Scripture is the government given the right to dictate whether a man practices a particular trade, provided the trade is not basically wrong, nor the right to prevent others from buying. Such regulative measures are foreign to the model of law provided by the Bible; they are tyranny. The power to destroy a man’s livelihood is an assertion of ownership over that livelihood. Just as Ahab had no right to Naboth’s vineyard in 1 Kings 21, no right to his vocation, so the government nowadays has no right to Eastman’s legal practice or any doctor’s right to treat patients (or anybody’s right to drive a car).

What the government does have a right to is punishing fraud and damage-done. If a man presents himself as a legal expert but turns out to not have the slightest clue, the people he cozened should have a right to recover damages from him- a process which will rightfully ruin his reputation and prevent others from being suckered in. Moreover, private licensure, credentials, and other testimonies to expertise would still be of importance, would still be useful for people to be sure they’ve found an expert, not a charlatan.

(Besides which, the current procedures, for all their corruption, fail to actually get rid of charlatans. There are some remarkably stupid lawyers, by all accounts, real legal ignoramuses, and many, many fools to boot, including many intelligent fools. Judges also have many dunces and fools in their ranks. As it turns out, the government isn’t actually good at filtering out the charlatans and the conmen. No mechanical process can be; if a guy’s capable of fooling people into believing he’s a competent lawyer despite being nothing of the sort, he can certainly go through the motions and get the credentials.)

All this practicality-consideration aside, though, the real question is not of ‘What works?’ but of ‘What’s right?’ God did not give government the job of making sure lawyers, doctors, drivers, and the rest were competent; He gave government the job of punishing those who abused those roles in specific ways. The job of sorting through professed-professionals falls to the people, to the community, to individuals, with the aid of His counsel. This being the course God commands, it is also the course which will work. His command, after all, not only assures us that this is the best course; it makes it the best course because it is the course He blesses (Ps. 127:1).

God bless.