On Crafts or the Story of a Shoemaker

Imagine you are a shoemaker. You decide to open a small workshop and to earn your living through the best that you can do. You win customers and who reward your skills more often. You work hard, pay your taxes and your clients are satisfied. One day a group of strangers enters your workshop:

– Show us your master license!

– The certificate for my skills is the people who need me and trust my work – my clients.

– You need a document – it is mandatory!

– I do not have such.

– Do you pay the statutory due?

– For what?

– Have you entered in the statutory register?

– What register?

– For your mandatory membership in the Chamber of Crafts.

– I just want to work. Why should I sign in a register and be a member somewhere?

– It's mandatory, for us to help you.

– But I don't want you to help me.

– You don't have any choice. It is mandatory. There is the act.

And these are the people whose professional organization you are assigned to and they are responsible for the hard and important task to help and to care for your development. They are charged by a law – The Crafts Act. Charged by a group of statesmen who have decided that your business is the backbone of the economy and you need help and targeted policies, whether you want it or not.

***

One of the most widespread misconceptions in the modern history of the world is that the state should and can interfere in the activities of entrepreneurs and to assist business. Often, the government does it through artificially created organizations, giving them a unique and monopolistic power over many aspects of the economic life in the country. In Bulgaria, this is achieved through legislation, which forced tens of thousands of people to join such organizations. Through force, mercilessly, without the right to choose.

Because it is for their own good!

The belief that a handful of people know better than millions of consumers, that they can dictate every step of the individual and should help with some money earned by others, is contrary to the most fundamental principles of economics. Thus, only an incorrect regulation decides who is allowed to work what s/he is capable of and what s/he wants. Only a single rule imposed from above undermines reputation that has been built for years.

This is the story of every enterprise that decision makers consider important. This is the story of the shoemaker and thousands of people like him – themselves strongly vulnerable and subordinated to the numerous regulations and bureaucratic burdens.

Because they are important!

But important for whom and how does that require state intervention?

If they are important, the mandatory association, the conditions that must be met to be able to work and a number of bureaucrat requirements, not only do not help, but hinder their development and their existence as a whole.

If their work is important, they can decide themselves how to take advantage of all the opportunities and there is no government tool that can teach entrepreneurs that. 

If the quality of their work is important, people using their services may, in a perfect way to distinguish the capable ones among the incapable and this rule has proven sound long before anyone ever thought of creating law and bureaucracy. 

Everything stated here makes unnecessary the imposition of such a gross interference in their professional lives. Moreover, many requirements, even covering education, training, qualifications and the necessary professional, organizational and creative skills, distort logic and the direct link in the correlation. Thus, the state should not only unnecessarily regulate people's endeavor, but it should be the main guardian of their liberty.

Because they must be free! 

Today, they are not, but they could be. The monopoly of organizations created by the state must be immediately removed. Barriers to entry into any profession or trade should be lifted. State intervention in economic life should be reduced to a minimum, because freedom is the age-old right of any individual and the shortest way to mankind's prosperity.