State-mandated licensing of interior designers is our only possible protection from life-threatening color clashes

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Via Coyote Blog, Clark Neily of the Institute for Justice argues against occupational licensing for interior designers in the Wall Street Journal:

Imagine you were a state legislator and some folks asked you to pass a law making it a crime to give advice about paint colors and throw pillows without a license. And imagine they told you that the only people qualified to place large pieces of furniture in a room are those who have gotten a college degree in interior design, completed a two-year apprenticeship, and passed a national licensing exam. And by the way, it is criminally misleading for people who practice interior design to use that term without government permission.

You might stare at them incredulously for a moment, then look down at your calendar and say, “Oh, I get it — April Fool!” Right? Wrong.

These folks represent the American Society of Interior Designers (ASID), an industry group whose members have waged a 30-year, multimillion-dollar lobbying campaign to legislate their competitors out of business. And those absurd restrictions on advice about paint selection, throw pillows and furniture placement represent the actual fruits of lobbying in places like Alabama, Nevada and Illinois, where ASID and its local affiliates have peddled their snake-oil mantra that “Every decision an interior designer makes affects life safety and quality of life.”

Legislative analysis by a half-dozen states that rebuffed ASID’s attempts to cartelize interior design — including Colorado, Washington and South Carolina — has failed to support ASID’s claim that the location of your couch or the color of your bedroom walls is literally a matter of life and death. As the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies put it, there is “no evidence of physical or financial harm being caused to . . . consumers by the unregulated practice of interior designers.”

Lacking any factual support for its sweeping public welfare claims, ASID and its supporters often resort to fear-mongering.[…]

If there were any credible evidence that unregulated interior design presents a genuine risk to consumers, ASID would certainly have found it by now. They have had plenty of time (more than three decades), resources (dues for ASID’s 40,000 members average several hundred dollars per year), and incentive. Furthermore, despite ASID’s best efforts, only three states regulate the practice of interior design. That leaves 47 (including California and New York) where the ravages of unlicensed interior design could be easily documented — if there were any.

So what is really behind ASID’s relentless push for more regulation? Simple: naked economic protectionism.

It is no accident that the credentials required for licensure in ASID-backed occupational licensing bills are the same credentials required for membership in ASID itself. This includes a four-year degree from an accredited interior design college, a two-year apprenticeship, and a two-day, thousand-dollar licensing exam so irrelevant to the actual practice of interior design that many ASID members have never bothered to pass it themselves and simply get a waiver instead.

In vetoing interior design legislation last May, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels explained that the “principal effect” of the law would have been “to restrain competition and limit new entrants into the occupation.” Mr. Daniels noted that interior designers were “hardly the only profession” seeking government protection from potential competitors.

The numbers certainly bear him out. Fifty years ago, only 5% of the American workforce was licensed; today it is nearly 30%. We’re not talking about brain surgeons or airline pilots, either. Louisiana requires florists to be licensed (yes, florists), and in several states — including Louisiana, Oklahoma and Virginia — only licensed funeral directors may sell caskets, a state-sanctioned monopoly they use to jack up prices anywhere from 400% to 600%, a fact established in litigation by the Institute for Justice in Tennessee and Oklahoma.

It seems plausible to me that, seeing the naked grasping of the interior designers, that many people reading here could come to have a clearer understanding of the real estate licensing laws — which were written by the National Association of Realtors.

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