This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, May 23rd, 2012. I'm Caleb Brown.

For many low-income people, the government's reach can be long indeed. A growing number of Americans in low-income jobs need a government

license to do their work. Dick Carpenter is co-author of a new Institute for Justice report on Occupational Licensing, licensed to work, a national study of burdens from occupational

licensing.

Some people think of it as an either or, either there's going to be licensing or there'll be

no licensing and the public will be threatened, their health and

safety and so forth.

And we won't know what quality consumer or what quality producer will be out there.

In fact, that's not an either or. In fact, there are many

different options that exist for people to understand the quality of the person who might

provide their good or service, or there are many other ways to

judge whether or not someone's safety is going to be protected.

So if you're a consumer, there are options out there like the Better Business Bureau.

There's Angie's List, there's Yelp.

You go on Google or any other search field and there are numerous consumer reviews out there.

So there are plenty of ways for people to find out how is it that this person could provide a

quality service to me.

How can I know if I'm going to get the good or service that I'm looking for.

And then on the public safety side, in our report, what we demonstrate is that if there were really

a significant threat to public health and safety by many of these occupations, you would expect them to be licensed

everywhere, all over the place.

But in fact, most of our, almost all of the occupations that we studied are unlicensed somewhere and in fact many places

...