Without Licensing, How Will We Know Which Blogs to Read?

I read in comments yesterday some queries as to how people are supposed to find a quality masseuse in a world where anyone with a massage table is allowed to set up shop. I think that's pretty easy. People would connect with service providers the same way we connect with service providers today—through recommendations, reviews, and branding.

I recently had some oral surgery to remove a cyst from my jaw and repair the bone with an alloplastic graft of some kind. I'm pretty certain the guy was a duly licensed surgeon, and I have no particular problem with surgeon licensing. But in the real world, I didn't come to his office by looking him up on a surgeon registry at the licensing agency. Indeed, I didn't even check his licensing status. What happened is that he was recommended by my dentist, who was recommended by a co-worker. What's more the surgeon my dentist recommended was on Washingtonian's list of the best doctors in the DC area. He even got a special star next to his name for doubleplusgood recommending.

An important nuance here is that fraud is already illegal. You can't tell customers you won a James Beard Award unless you actually won a James Beard Award. Training and certification programs that are actually reliable indicators of quality shouldn't need the force of law to gain traction in the marketplace. Lots of forms of necessary regulation can't be replaced by better enforcement of fraud laws, but lots of the alleged problems that require licensing as a solution are dealt with perfectly well by general fraud rules.