I guess we may need to get-block OpenDTV in Oregon. We may be practicing
engineering without a license...
Do you have an engineering license Bert?
;-)
Regards
Craig
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/448392/oregon-engineering-license-case-mats-jarlstrom-free-speech
Engineering without a License
June 7, 2017 8:00 PM
Beginning this week, Washington hopes that infrastructure, which is a product
of civil engineering, will be much discussed. But if you find yourself in
Oregon, keep your opinions to yourself, lest you get fined $500 for practicing
engineering without a license. This happened to Mats Jarlstrom as a result of
events that would be comic if they were not symptoms of something sinister.
Jarlstrom’s troubles began when his wife got a $150 red-light-camera ticket. He
became interested in the timing of traffic lights and decided there was
something wrong with the formula used in Oregon and elsewhere to time how long
traffic lights stay yellow as they transition from green to red. He began
thinking, Googling, corresponding, and — here he made his big mistake — talking
about this subject. He has ignored repeated demands by the Oregon State Board
of Examiners for Engineering and Land Surveying that he pipe down. So the board
considers him to be, like Jesse James, Al Capone, and John Dillinger, a
dangerous recidivist.
Not that it should matter, but Jarlstrom actually is an engineer. He has a
degree in electrical engineering, served in a technical capacity in the Swedish
air force, and worked for Sweden’s Luxor Electronics before immigrating to the
United States in 1992. He is, however, not licensed by Oregon to “practice
engineering” — design skyscrapers, bridges, etc. — so, according to the board,
he should not be allowed to talk about engineering, or even call himself an
engineer. Only those the board licenses are admitted to the clerisy uniquely
entitled to publicly discuss engineering.
After Jarlstrom e-mailed his traffic-lights ideas to the board, it declared the
e-mails illegal because in them he called himself an engineer. The board
investigated him for 22 months and fined him $500 for expressing opinions
without getting a professional-engineer license. This would have involved a
six-hour examination ($225 fee), an eight-hour examination ($350 fee), an
application to the board ($360 fee), and a demonstration of “education and
experience” that usually requires a four-year apprenticeship.
The board has tried to bully others, too. It investigated and warned a
political candidate about calling himself an engineer without being licensed by
the board. (He has Cornell and MIT degrees in environmental and civil
engineering, and membership in the American Society of Civil Engineers.) For
the same reason, the board is in its twelfth month investigating a
gubernatorial candidate who said “I’m an engineer” in a political ad. (He has a
mechanical engineering degree from Purdue and was an engineer at Ford and
Boeing.)
The Oregon board has until June 14 to answer the court complaint filed on
Jarlstrom’s behalf by the Institute for Justice, the nation’s liberty law firm
that a few years ago stopped North Carolina’s Board of Dietetics/Nutrition from
silencing a blogger who dispensed his opinions about various diets. Oregon’s
board will probably receive a judicial spanking for suppressing Jarlstrom’s
right to speak and, were he to try to earn income from his work on traffic
lights, his freedom of occupational speech.
Gargantuan government, which becomes so by considering itself entitled to
allocate wealth and opportunity, incites such rent-seeking.
William Mellor and Dick M. Carpenter, the Institute for Justice’s founding
general counsel and director of strategic research, respectively, have recently
published a book, Bottleneckers, about people like the officious nuisances on
the Oregon board. The book defines a bottlenecker as “a person who advocates
for the creation or perpetuation of government regulation, particularly an
occupational license, to restrict entry into his or her occupation, thereby
accruing an economic advantage without providing a benefit to consumers.”
Gargantuan government, which becomes so by considering itself entitled to
allocate wealth and opportunity, incites such rent-seeking. And given today’s
acceptance of increased regulation and censorship of speech, bottleneckers
buttress their power (as incumbent politicians do with spending regulations
that control the quantity of campaign speech) by making the exercise of a
constitutional right contingent on government approval.
The Oregon board should remember Diane Hartley, who probably prevented a
Manhattan calamity. In 1977, the 59-story Citicorp Center was built on
Lexington Avenue. In 1978, Hartley, an undergraduate engineering student,
concluded that the building could be toppled by strong winds that could be
expected during the building’s life. After her math was validated, emergency
repairs were made.
If busybodies like those on Oregon’s board had been wielding power in New York
in 1978, Hartley would have been fined for “practicing” — that is, speaking her
mind about — engineering without a license, and what then was the world’s
seventh-tallest building might have fallen, full of people, into congested
Midtown.
— George Will is a Pulitzer Prize–winning syndicated columnist. © 2017
Washington Post Writers Group