Opinion: Rise of the Licensing Cartel

Should only dentists be allowed to whiten people’s teeth? Or is this a service anyone should be allowed to offer? This may sound like a silly question at first, but when the deeper question of occupational licensing is applied to the broader economy, it turns out that there are millions of jobs and hundreds of billions of dollars at stake. Keep in mind that the Food and Drug Administration already regulates teeth-whitening products for safety and that virtually no one has ever been injured by someone administering these products. But in a number of states throughout the country, dentists began losing teeth-whitening customers to non-dentists who had set up kiosks in shopping malls and were charging less money for the same teeth-whitening services.