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From: laura@l5.uucp (Laura Creighton)
Newsgroups: net.politics.theory
Subject: Re: Credentials, State vs. private
Message-ID: <126@l5.uucp>
Date: Mon, 16-Sep-85 13:36:22 EDT
Article-I.D.: l5.126
Posted: Mon Sep 16 13:36:22 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 19-Sep-85 05:45:59 EDT
References: <4297@alice.UUCP> <1565@umcp-cs.UUCP>
Reply-To: laura@l5.UUCP (Laura Creighton)
Organization: Ell-Five [Consultants], San Francisco
Lines: 25

In article <1565@umcp-cs.UUCP> mangoe@umcp-cs.UUCP (Charley Wingate) writes:
>
>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.


Okay, it sounds to me like there is a market for doctor-verification here.
The prospective patients will want this and the doctors will want this a
great deal. So someone will set up a doctor-verification agency. (Actually,
it will probably be more general than just doctor verification -- in 
Libertaria this problem is going to crop up again and again.) It will
be constrained to be honest by the same constraints that make the AMA
(or Consumer Reports, or a high-minded public official) honest -- because
it will be staffed by people who are genuinely concerned with the problem,
because it will be staffed by people who are honoroable, because it will
loose all its customers if it prints lies and because people will sue it
for fantastic sums of money if it doesn't.
-- 
Laura Creighton		(note new address!)
sun!l5!laura		(that is ell-five, not fifteen)
l5!laura@lll-crg.arpa