This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, September 16th, 2010.

I'm Caleb Brown. In Washington, D.C. and other cities in the United States, it's illegal to talk without a license.

That is, if you're a tour guide in DC and you accept

money to give tours and describe buildings, doing so without an occupational license

could land you in jail for 90 days.

Rubber McNamara, staff attorney at the Institute for Justice hopes to get the law thrown out.

The Institute for Justice, on behalf of two D.C. Area Tour Guides, Tanya Edwards and Bill Maine,

filed a major First Amendment challenge to Washington DC's tour guide licensing scheme,

standing up for the basic principle that the First Amendment does not allow the government to be in the business of deciding who can and can't talk.

And I have particular interest in this because my dad's coming to visit me here in Washington, D.C. soon.

So I should try to, if I want to be civilly disobedient, have him pay me to show him and his

wife around town for a couple of bucks in order to flout the law.

If your dad gives you a $5 bill and you tell him this right here is the capital

building you can go to jail for 90 days. What is the capital building, you can go to jail for 90 days.

What is the rationale from the DC government?

Washington, D.C., like a lot of governments

throughout history, thinks things would be better

if it got to decide who got to say things about the city.

And that's exactly backwards.

In this country, we rely on people to decide who they want to listen to.

We don't rely on the government to decide who's going to be allowed to talk.

It's obviously this is a free speech issue but the

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