Many industries are presently regulated to disallow some people from entering the industry. These regulated industries require some form of professional license in order to practice (such as medical doctors, dentists, engineers, pharmacists) and require two things from a potential licensee.
1. Industry specific knowledge.
2. Objective reasoning ability.
For instance a doctor must be able to gather real information about a patient and then use their knowledge to make a diagnosis and prescribe treatment, or an engineer must be able to gather real information about a system in order to determine how it can be upgraded without causing instability.
What is not required of any of these professionals is good relationships with other professionals in their industry. One could argue that by consulting colleagues, a doctor or engineer can objectively improve their service to the patient or client, but this is an optional improvement rather than a requirement.
One of the problems with the present regulatory systems are that they require a set of professional references in order to obtain licensure. This unnecesary requirement was intended as a supplement to objective testing to insure that the two requirements listed above are met, however, in practice it is applied for an entirely different purpose. Existing professionals use this requirement for references whenever possible to limit potential competition by refusing to supply references to any individual that isn’t subservient to them. This limitation on competition artificially reduces the supply of professionals and therefore drives up the salaries of the existing professionals. So the existing professionals can gain doubly by not providing references to people that are not in some way beholden onto them. Unfortunately, by selecting new professionals in this way, only kantian subjectivists and Nietzscheans will be able pass through. The Kantian Subjectivists will be inherently less competent due to defects in their ability to think objectively, and the Nietzscheans will be competent but destructive in their works rather than creative.
Eliminating the need for professional references and compensating by making the objective testing process more stringent and comprehensive will increase the supply of professionals and therefore drive down costs to companies, clients, and patients; and the industry may be able to have professionals that think objectively and independently, but are not necessarily Nietzscheans.
#writing #Nonfiction
Copyright © 2017 Jonathan Hart
