This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, June 12, 2018. I'm Caleb Brown.

Florida's rules governing who can sell hearing aids are antiquated and preempted by federal law.

According to Larry Salzman of the Pacific Legal Foundation,

we talked about PLF's new case challenging Florida's onerous rules this weekend.

One of Pacific Legal Foundations newest cases involves Dan Taylor.

Dan is our client in Florida, he lives in Southern Florida, and he's been a hearing aid specialist for 30 years.

And what that means is he has a license from the government to sell hearing aids.

Over the years, he's found that the license is unnecessary, burdensome, increases the cost of hearing

aids, and that's because in Florida they have one of the more restrictive regimes for what it takes to selling a hearing aid.

You have to have a multitude of government-mandated tests

before you're allowed to sell a consumer hearing aid.

And what he was finding is the newer generation of hearing age,

the ones that work with your smartphones, the ones that can be calibrated using a personal computer,

just didn't require these tests.

You know, maybe back 20, 30 years ago,

you got a hearing aid, you sat in a booth with an audiologist,

they did this tone test.

For most people, none of that is necessary any longer.

And he thought, this is crazy. I'm putting all of my consumers,

all my customers through these tests, they're unnecessary. I don't want to do that anymore.

I don't think I need this government license. And he was bolstered in that by reading articles about what the federal

government has been doing in the area of occupational licensing for hearing

...