Virginia Postrel, Columnist

Licensing Makes It Harder to Go Where the Jobs Are

Want to relocate to another state to be a teacher or a plumber? Get ready to go back to school and pass another test.

December 28, 2017 at 1:00 PM UTC

Virginia Postrel is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. She is a visiting fellow at the Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy at Chapman University and author, most recently, of “The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World.”

Let me see your license.
Photographer: Joe Amon/Denver Post via Getty Images

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The U.S. is a continent-wide single market with free movement across state lines. This has driven economic development since the 19th century. It encouraged mass production, national distribution and labor mobility.

That calculus is changing as services, from home repair to hospitality to health care, make up a bigger chunk of personal spending and a higher proportion of jobs. You can still build a successful enterprise that spreads costs over a huge customer base -- see Amazon.com Inc. or Alphabet Inc. (Google) -- but many of today’s service jobs are done directly for consumers. They’re in-person and inherently local. Physical therapists and personal trainers can’t telecommute. That makes where people live all the more important to their incomes.