Engineer’s plight illustrates overreach via licensing laws

traffic lights stay yellow as they transition from green to red. He has ignored repeated demands by the Oregon State Board of Examiners for Engineering and Land Surveying that he pipe down.

Not that it should matter, but Jarlstrom actually is an engineer. He is, however, not licensed by Oregon to “practice engineering” so, according to the board, he should not be allowed to talk about engineering, or even call himself an engineer.

After Jarlstrom emailed his traffic lights ideas to the board, it declared the emails 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’s license. 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.)

The Oregon board has until Wednesday to answer the court complaint filed on Jarlstrom’s behalf by the Institute for Justice.

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 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 and what then was the world’s seventh-tallest building might have fallen, full of people, into congested Midtown.