This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, February 13th, 2017, and Caleb Brown.

Bottleneckers are the narrow interests, the rent seekers, business people who try to shut down or otherwise regulate out of existence their competition, and they need to be stopped.

So says Dick Carpenter, co-author of the new book, Bottleneckers, we spoke last month.

Something Richard Epstein said a long time ago was, and I'm paraphrasing and I'm sure I'm not

getting precisely correct, but it's the idea that good rules

governing human action are rules that are designed to accommodate a large volume of transactions. That is, the rule is clear. People

understand what it means and there's no difficulties that are presented. there's no special favor you must seek in order to get

your transactions going.

And from what I read from your book, this is about people who are in the business of preventing transactions.

Yes, that's exactly right.

Yeah, their entire purpose is to narrow the flow of workers into occupations so that they can enjoy some economic benefit

as a result.

And not only do they make these hurdles as high as possible, these bottlenecks as restrictive as possible in terms

of how difficult it is to earn an occupational license.

But what we have found over the years is that often it's incredibly difficult to understand what one has to do to get the license.

So sometimes it's so difficult that we have called licensing agencies or licensing boards and we have tried to ask

them to tell us what is it that I have to do to earn this license as a clear objective

measure and not only can they not tell us they clear objective measure. measure.

And not only can they not tell us, they refuse to tell us.

They've actually said to us, well, you'll need to consult an attorney.

These are the licensing agencies themselves, licensing boards who either cannot or will not

tell us.

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