<p>If you are not sure about it, then why did you say “Anyone can give medical advice.”? </p>
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<p>True, but earlier you said the following about the patent bar: “One simply has to know the material.” This was dead wrong.</p>
<p>This again illustrates my point that there are a lot of non-lawyers who think they know the law but really don’t.</p>
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<p>My argument is clear enough. The point is that there is significant value in protecting the public from non-lawyers who think they know the law but really don’t. </p>
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<p>But that’s not what you stated. You stated: “One simply has to know the material” That was dead wrong.</p>
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<p>Umm, you’ve shifted the goal posts. Previously you said "Law is one of the few professions that actively creates more regulation in order to justify it’s own existence. " You did NOT say “Law is one of the few professions where the licensing requirements impinge upon free speech.”</p>
<p>In any event, are you claiming that there is some court decision out there that holds that “free speech” includes the right of non-lawyers to give legal advice? Or are you claiming that “freedom of speech” ought to include that right?</p>
<p>And here’s a question for you: a few months back in Newark, there was some dude who was taking money from black people in exchange for advising them about a supposed tax deduction just for blacks. A tax deduction that doesn’t exist. Do you think what that dude was engaged in protected speech?</p>
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<p>Oh really? I guess that means that the tax code is ludicrous; every war we’ve ever fought in was ludicrous; social security is ludicrous; etc etc.</p>
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<p>Ok, so instead of saying that the tort system is ludicrous, you are now saying that the tort is system IS. Well, I guess that’s true.</p>
<p>And by the way, I’m still waiting for cites and specific examples of the many lawyers who engage in rent-seeking behavior and add very little value.</p>
<p>Ok, now I see your argument. You are saying that (1) the tort system is a decent sized political issue in the United States, and therefore (2) this is evidence that lawyers are best at extracting rents.</p>
<p>There’s a definition on the previous page. Basically as the definition says, the most popular conception of rent seeking is when people try to make more money not by producing anything of value but by imposing legal restrictions on other people. </p>
<p>For example, let’s suppose you are in a medieval city and you are one of 20 breadbakers. You are worried about an influx of new breadbakers so you convince the King to issue a decree that only the 20 original breadbakers may legally sell bread in the city. This lets you keep up the price of bread and preserve and enhance profits for you and the other breadbakers. Of course bread consumers end up paying more for bread in this scenario. So it could be said that you are extracting economic rents from the citizenry.</p>
<p>It can certainly be argued that there is an element of this sort of guildlike rent-seeking behavior in most regulated professions. But at the same time, there is also an element of consumer protection. No doubt the breadbaking guild would argue that they are merely protecting the public from inferior bread.</p>
<p>Perhaps a satisfactory resolution of the above scenario I described would be to let anyone bake bread for sale, but require them to pay a yearly licensing fee and submit to regular inspections of their baking facilities by the King’s men. (To make things fairer, we could say that people have the right to challenge the results of the inspection before an impartial tribunal. We could also promulgate written standards for sanitation and the like. :))</p>
<p>Anyway, it’s interesting that the people who accuse lawyers of guildlike behavior are often the same people who say that there are too many lawyers and too many lawsuits.</p>