As a general rule, Americans in general and Nevadans in particular are far too keen on regulating businesses and their customers. The news that a large scale audit of various occupational licensing boards revealed that many of the boards are significantly overpaying their members is irritating but not surprising – the larger the overall regulatory environment, the harder it is to maintain oversight of the regulators by anyone accountable to voters.

The list of occupations licensed by the state is frankly bizarre. I get physicians and other professions where killing people is a real possibility for the incompetent or under-educated provider of services. But acupuncturists? Physical trainers? Private investigators? Barbers, for crying out loud? Most of these licensing operations are nothing more than government sanctioned gatekeeping cartels whereby entrenched members of a profession (the boards always feature working members of the profession) are positioned to limit their own competition.

Even consumer protection is generally not a very good excuse. If I think my barber stinks at his job, I can just go to another one. (He doesn’t – he’s incredible, and you should go to Cipriani’s in Carson City the next time you need a trim.) If I want to know he’s been trained, he can put a diploma from whatever barber school he went to on the wall. When you consider that the hundreds of thousands of Nevadans who work preparing and serving us our food have no such occupational licensing requirements, the whole scheme starts to look pretty ridiculous.

The audit’s suggestion that some of our regulatory boards are pushing (or abusing) their lack of oversight should worry us all, and should prompt our politicians to take a hard look not just at what the boards are being paid, but whether what they do adds sufficient value to justify their existence at all. Boards will tell you they are there to prevent and punish fraud, but defrauding customers would still be illegal – and prosecutable – without setting up a separate legal scheme for every single type of job in the state.

If there’s any single occupation that exemplifies this, it’s the world’s oldest one.

People like to think of Nevada as a libertarian state because we have blackjack, weed and hookers, but to believe this myth is to wrongly confuse “libertarian” with “libertine.” 

Proponents of legal prostitution argue that two consenting adults ought to be able to do whatever they want with each other, including buying and selling sex from each other. It’s a fair enough argument. So why regulate the brothels at all?

Oh, I’m not talking about regular medical checkups or mandatory condoms. Those make perfect sense. But brothels and the prostitutes who live and work there are extremely regulated beyond this. They are severely limited in where and how they may advertise and where they can work. Worst of all, most counties that allow brothels limit the number of such establishments that can exist within their various municipal jurisdictions. Why is this? Because Dennis Hof or Lance Gilman have a lot more money and political power if they effectively control a monopoly on the local sex trade. They also control the girls, who can’t simply quit their jobs and work for the pimp down the street who has better working conditions.

Limiting the number of any type of business has no legitimate purpose – it serves only to benefit existing businesses at the expense of new entrepreneurs. Protectionism and cronyism of this kind stifle economic innovation and growth, and limit options of both employees and consumers. In the case of the prostitutes, those limits can be horrific.

Hof (and I’m sure his practice is typical around the state) requires the women who work in his facilities to turn over half of whatever they make on a trick. Then he dictates where they can live (he just so happens to be their landlord), and makes them pay for rent, food, medical and licensing expenses out of the other half. He calls them “independent contractors” so he doesn’t have to pay additional taxes or provide benefits to them.

I don’t care how much you like being a prostitute in theory (and most of them don’t), those are horrible and abusive working conditions, only possible when another local employer can’t legally offer you a better deal.

So why not let another brothel compete? Why not let as many cathouses open as the local market will sustain? It’s not like we need to statutorily prevent McDonald’s from opening a franchise across from a Jack-In-the-Box. Why not let another pimp open a competing shop next door where the ladies are treated with humanity? Why not let the women be actual independent contractors, and let them hang their own shingle, as it were? 

If prostitution really is no big deal, and if we all want to play the game of “better to keep it legal and regulated,” then go whole hog with it. What makes Dennis Hof wealthy in Nye County ought not make him a felon in Clark. Regulate brothels like any other business, state-wide, and let the market flourish above board. But if it is a big deal, and inherently a societal harm (and it is), then ban it for real. It’s not as if legal brothels do anything to limit illegal street prostitution or human trafficking.

Instead we have the worst of both worlds. A “legal” economy that – because of excess regulations – is impossible for new entrepreneurs to fairly compete in or prostitutes to have an escape from. We have special dispensation for pimps to not treat their employees like employees in order to keep them where they are, which is why you don’t hear about all those ex-hookers who graduated from college debt-free with all that extra cash they made at the Bunny Ranch. And we give human trafficking just enough cover to really flourish in our state.

It’s easy to look at a regulation of any kind and see a veneer of public safety and consumer protection. But lawmakers and regulators must go deeper than that and consider all the unintended (or in some cases, perfectly well intended) consequences (and often counterproductivity) of their excessive regulations.

Orrin Johnson has been writing and commenting on Nevada and national politics since 2007. He started with an independent blog, First Principles, and was a regular columnist for the Reno Gazette-Journal from 2015-2016. By day, he is a deputy district attorney for Carson City. He received no compensation for the gratuitous plug of his barber. His opinions here are his own. Follow him on Twitter @orrinjohnson, or contact him at [email protected].