Designing Women Fight Big Government

September 25, 2008

In July 1988, a bureaucrat from the Department of Consumer Protection (DCP) walked into Susan Roberts’s business and told her she was lying to her customers.

Roberts, who operated an antique and interior-design company in Old Saybrook, hadn’t jumped through the onerous regulatory hoops required to legally -- yes, legally -- advertise herself as an “interior designer” in Connecticut.

Five years earlier, at the urging of both the industry and interior-design professors, legislators and Governor William O’Neill enacted a “titling” law. It mandated that anyone selling their services as an interior designer must first pass an exam administered by a private entity, the National Council for Interior Design Qualification. Eligibility to even take the exam requires coursework and thousands of hours of experience. (Pass the test, and you’ll pay the state $150 a year for use of the term.)

For 25 years, designers who have failed to live up to Connecticut’s rigid definition of their profession have broken the law. If they’re caught, they are subject to a $500 fine and up to one year in prison.

Susan Roberts has complied with the law ever since her encounter with the DCP. But earlier this month, she joined forces with two other designers, Lynne Herrmann of Newtown and Cynthia Hernandez of Farmington. With help from the D.C.-based Institute for Justice, they filed a civil-rights lawsuit in U.S. District Court, claiming that the state has no authority to define what is and isn’t “interior design.”

As the complaint makes clear, this isn’t merely a fight about semantics: “Because Plaintiffs cannot advertise themselves accurately as ‘interior designers,’ they must instead use terms like ‘decorator’ or ‘consultant,’ which are sometimes used as pejoratives in the industry and are understood by some to connote a relatively lower level of skill or ability than that of ‘interior designers.’” The three women are put in the bizarre position of being able “to provide interior design services,” but are forbidden “from describing themselves, accurately, as ‘interior designers.’”

Titling laws are usually justified as tools to ensure quality, as well as protect the health and safety of consumers. But research shows that documented cases of poor service and unsafe providers are rarely the impetus for titling. “The force behind the creation of titling laws ... is overwhelmingly factions within the industry itself,” writes the Institute’s Dick M. Carpenter II.

Why would any industry want more regulation? The answer is as simple as the law of supply and demand. Contrary to liberal bromides about the business community’s slavish support for the free market, trade associations and corporate lobbyists frequently seek government micromanagement of their industries. Measures that limit market entrants are helpful in boosting profits. (“For competition-shy incumbents,” The Economist recently editorialized, “no risk is so trivial that government action is not required to avert it.”)

Titling, observes Carpenter, is “a vehicle for occupational insiders to ‘professionalize’ their trade by regulating who may and may not use a title … in professional work. Once ensconced, such laws make for a natural point of evolution toward full occupational licensing.”

Licensing laws mandate state certification of occupations such as chiropractor, barber, funeral director, and insurance agent. Researchers have consistently found that these requirements reduce the number of providers, drive up costs, and create black markets. One economist estimated that in 2000, the cost of occupational-licensing regulations was as high as $41.7 billion.

Market-based alternatives to occupational licensing exist, but they’re anathema in The Land of Steady Habits, given its climate of regulatory excess. A 2007 study by the Reason Foundation found that Connecticut has 68 percent more occupational-licensing mandates than the average for the states. (Ironically, Connecticut has yet to pass a license requirement for interior design -- apparently the titling law alone does the job.)

With advertising censorship, occupational licensing, sweetheart deals, “cluster” initiatives, “workforce development” programs, and redevelopment land grabs -- the Institute for Justice litigated Susette Kelo’s case against the loathsome New London Development Corporation -- the state’s corporatist quiver is full of arrows. But thanks to three interior designers who refuse to surrender to an absurd, anti-competitive law, a bit of relief for one profession may be on the way.

In their complaint, Roberts, Herrmann, and Hernandez argue that by barring them from advertising themselves as what they are, the state, “acting under color of … law, violate[s] Plaintiffs’ right to free speech as guaranteed by the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution.” That’s a no-brainer to most of us. Soon, we’ll learn if a federal judge agrees.

D. Dowd Muska is a writer, commentator and public-policy researcher. His website is www.dowdmuska.com.

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