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From: mangoe@umcp-cs.UUCP (Charley Wingate)
Newsgroups: net.politics.theory
Subject: Re: Credentials, State vs. private
Message-ID: <1565@umcp-cs.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 12-Sep-85 20:44:28 EDT
Article-I.D.: umcp-cs.1565
Posted: Thu Sep 12 20:44:28 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 15-Sep-85 09:47:28 EDT
References: <4297@alice.UUCP>
Organization: U of Maryland, Computer Science Dept., College Park, MD
Lines: 30

In article <4297@alice.UUCP> ark@alice.UucP (Andrew Koenig) writes:

>Bill Tanenbaum says:

>> But when I go to a doctor, I want to know that he/she has gone to medical
>> school, had some experience as an intern, and passed that exam.  So
>> does virtually everybody else, except Libertarian utopians.

>That, of course, is not in dispute.  What is in dispute is whether
>or not the government should be in the certification business.

>Medical schools have reputations, and reputations are not easily
>gained or kept.  Do you really think that Harvard is going to start
>letting incompetents graduate just because the government stops
>looking over their shoulders?

>In a free society, if you wanted to know whether your doctor had
>gone to medical school, you would ask.  If you didn't get a
>satisfactory answer, you could go elsewhere.  The only role the
>government would play is that if the answer you got were a lie,
>you could press fraud charges.

The problem with this is that in fact people aren't well enough informed to
judge in general, and that changes in reputation generally lag changes in
actuality considerably, often being completely unrelated to reality.  A
person living in rural Tennessee often does not have the resources available
to find out whether the slick young man is really from Harvard, as he claims
to be.

Charley Wingate