Regulating the Personal Trainer Industry

It has recently been brought to my attention that some members of the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA) are considering introducing legislation to regulate the personal training profession. Of course, their goal is to set the standards for and control entry to and practice of the profession. That is, they want the State (law) to require that all personal trainers be educated and certified by the NSCA.

This really shows the spiritual poverty of the NSCA. If they had grasp of the truth and were capable of proving themselves to be the best in a fair competition, i.e. a free market, they would not seek to "regulate" the profession, i.e. eliminate all competitors by force of law. But since they lack the spiritual power that comes from grasp of truth, they are incapable of winning the market unless they use force to quiet all dissenters. Thus, they seek to monopolize the market by engaging the material power of the State.

Obviously, those who are in favor of licensing believe that the State should regulate the education of professionals, control entry into professions, and set standards for practice of the professions. In other words, these people believe that the State (via the licensing boards) should control what professionals are taught and allowed to say and do.

On the other hand, there are people like myself who believe that the State's power must be severely limited to protect the natural right of the individual to use his body and mind freely in private enterprises to generate wealth and achieve health and happiness. Hence, we believe that the State should have essentially no control over private enterprise, including the education or practice of professionals.

For those who think that licensing has always been with us, a brief history lesson is in order. In the nineteenth century in America, the State did not license professions. For example, medicine was not monopolized by one trade union (i.e. the American Medical Association), but was diverse, including osteopaths, homeopaths, herbalists, and others, all having different points of view and educational backgrounds.

Unfortunately, at the turn of the century, "reformers" started fighting freedom and promoting State control of private enterprises, i.e. socialism. Thanks to F.D.R.'s New Deal, and all of his followers, today all of the planks of the 1928 Socialist Party are part of U.S. government-as-usual, and the people of this nation have forgotten that the primary aim of the Constitution was to protect the individual from State interference in his private enterprises.

It is my contention that all licensing laws are unethical, unconstitutional, and contrary to the essence of the human spirit. We do not need any new licensing laws, and if we are serious about upholding the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the principle of individual freedom, we should aim to eliminate these and all other laws that enable the State to interfere in private enterprise.

Licensing is Unethical

Man is born free, with certain inalienable, natural rights, namely the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. When I call these rights natural and inalienable, I mean that these are the necessary conditions for a man's survival, health and prosperity as a sovereign individual. To deny these rights is to prevent man from acting as man.

The right to life means that a man's life is his own. He is not property nor can he regard any other human as property. This means that the individual is alone responsible for his own life and is the rightful owner of any and all goods, whether material or intellectual, he may produce by his own efforts to maintain his own life.

To maintain his own life, and achieve health and happiness, the individual has the need and therefore the right to work for his own benefit, using all powers of his mind and body, to freely pursue his own interests, in any way whatsoever, so long as doing so does not deprive others of life or liberty.

In other words, man by Nature is given the need and thus right to engage in free enterprise, which means trading honest productive physical or mental labor for the goods he requires to maintain and improve his life.

[Before going on, free enterprise should be distinguished from capitalism, wherein an individual accumulates wealth not through honest labor and productivity contributing to general welfare, but by charging interest on capital (money) lent to productive people. Through practice of capitalism, non-productive gamblers (bankers and investors) live handsomely as leaches off the efforts of productive people. In addition, it causes inflation, or the devaluation of money, because the price of goods and services must be raised beyond actual cost/value simply to pay the tributes ("interest") demanded by the gamblers.]

Only through exercise of this natural right to free enterprise can a person achieve health, wealth, and happiness. Licensing laws are unethical because they obstruct this natural right.

For example, since I have a need to support myself, and an interest in and aptitude for the science of strength training, I enrolled in a course of study with the International Association of Resistance Trainers (I.A.R.T.), a legitimate business which provides education and a certification in the science of resistance training. I freely chose the I.A.R.T. because they displayed integrity and their position regarding the science of resistance training is the most rational of all I have surveyed, including that of the NSCA. I completed all educational requirements set forth by the I.A.R.T. and became certified.

Under present laws, I am allowed to practice the profession of personal training whether or not I am certified by any organization. Though the profession is very "open" and unregulated, it tends to regulate itself. This is because it is to the advantage of the individual wishing to be a trainer to obtain a certification from some reputable organization, as this increases his/her market value. In addition, incompetent trainers who fail to provide to consumers what the consumers in question desire are naturally eliminated from the market by consumer disapproval-i.e. such trainers lose business.

However, if the State passed a law that made graduation from an NSCA approved program a requirement for obtaining a license to practice personal training, I and many other currently well trained and/or successful trainers would suddenly be engaged in illegal activities and be required to attend NSCA approved programs and swallow and regurgitate NSCA beliefs to obtain a "license" to practice personal training. In other words, the State (really, the NSCA) would require-force-me to take a course of study in which I have no interest and for which I have no need, as I have determined that the NSCA promotes practices that are not only useless but in fact dangerous to me and to the public.

Such a law would thus prevent me from using all powers of my mind and body to pursue my own interests, support myself and achieve happiness.

Furthermore, should such circumstances come about, what about the consumer's right to access my services? If someone freely decides that he has an interest in getting personal training, and by his own thought concludes that personal trainers who are not members of the NSCA are most competent to provide that service, which might enhance his happiness, and he is willing to take a chance on it, he is told that he is not allowed to do so. This clearly violates his natural right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. In essence, the State is telling him that he does not own his life, that he does not have the liberty to follow his own reason and interests or pursue his own happiness, that he is not smart enough to make such decisions for himself, that the State will be Big Brother and make those decisions for him. This is unethical.

Licensing Violates Scientific Freedom

The Founding Fathers of America knew that the State becomes a tyranny and prevents scientific advance of humanity if it prevents the people from freely investigating Nature. At their time the primary impediment to scientific progress was the marriage of Church and State that prevailed in Europe. Therefore, they took special care to install in the Constitution protection for religious freedom, stating therein that "Congress shall make no laws regarding the establishment of religion..."

Unfortunately, the Founding Fathers did not anticipate the need also to specifically prohibit the separation of Science and State, and Professions and State. Through licensing laws, the State is actively involved in a) preventing the people from free inquiry, and b) promoting the belief-and-value system of one special interest group as the Truth for all.

The result is a marriage of one brand of "science" and State that is as oppressive as the marriage of Church and State that led the Founding Fathers of America to insert in the Constitution guarantees for religious freedom.

When the State licenses a profession, it allows a special interest group, a trade union, to determine what kind of education, training, and practice will be required of the professionals in question. Only people who have taken State-approved courses of education, and swallowed the State-approved view of things, are allowed to practice the licensed profession. Ultimately, this means that the State, or rather the State-approved trade union or special interest group (such as the NSCA) is in the position of deciding what is true and what is false.

This inhibits free inquiry and scientific progress, and converts a science into a State enforced religion. Roger Williams, Ph.D. comments using the example of "scientific" medicine: "Medical schools in this country are now standardized... and no matter what medical school one attends, one gets essentially the same instruction. Of course, there is no overt demand that compels individual medical educators to think alike, but no one can deny that a strong orthodoxy has developed, and that this has put a damper on the generation of challenging ideas. Research is strongly encouraged, to be sure, but only within the framework of the accepted ideology.

"Advanced students generally work with their professors on problems in which the professors are interested. Editors of medical and related journals have been brought up to think along similar lines, and this, of course, influences their thinking when the accept, reject, or modify manuscripts...it leaves little room for the basic truth enunciated many years ago by Orville Wright: 'If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true is really true, there would be little hope of advance.'

"It is easy to see that if in America we had only one church, all religious schools and seminaries and all weekly and monthly religious periodicals would echo essentially the same teaching. The parallel with the medical [or any other] profession is a close one. Since we have one kind of medicine [science]-established medicine [science]-all medical ['scientific'] schools teach essentially the same things; the curricula are so full of supposedly necessary things that there is too little time or inclination to explore new approaches. It becomes easy to drift into the conviction that what is accepted is really and unalterably true.

"When science becomes orthodoxy, it ceases to be science."[1]

Although many believe that modern medicine is "scientific", according to the Office of Technology Assessment, less than 20% of allopathic medical procedures have a sound scientific basis.[2] Thus, what is passed off as "science" really is just orthodoxy. When there is a State-enforced orthodoxy, there is State-enforced persecution of alternatives and minority groups. In Ohio for example, the State medical board has consistently harassed physicians who have strayed from conventional and approved practices-drug prescribing- into alternative methods, such as nutritional medicine, claiming that the latter is "not scientific." These unconventional physicians have been told that they must practice medicine according to the rules set by the State medical board, or they will lose their license to practice.

Thus, thanks to licensing laws, the lay population is forced to accept as "true" the (unscientific) theories, rules and the practices of a special interest group-e.g. the American Medical Association, or the NSCA-to the exclusion of alternatives in the science, art or craft.

To have scientific freedom, the people must be allowed to experiment freely with various theories and techniques based on those various theories. They must be allowed to conduct inquiry and educate themselves unhampered by State interference. The State has no right to outlaw any line of inquiry, even if some people believe that some theories or practices are irrational.

The situation is exactly parallel to that of religion. Atheists generally believe that atheism is more rational than theism. Nevertheless, the State is not empowered to outlaw theism or practices or professions based on theism. If a man decides that his happiness is enhanced by engaging in practices based on theism, it is his natural right to engage in those practices.

Just so, even if allopathic medicine (or the NSCA's "medicine", or the I.A.R.T.'s "medicine") is more rational than any other medical system, those who believe this to be so have no right to outlaw alternatives. Even if an individual's beliefs regarding treatment of disease are irrational, it is wrong to outlaw practices based on those beliefs, or prevent him from accessing practitioners of his choice, so long as his doing so does not infringe upon the natural rights of others. To prevent him from exercising his choice in the matter is to violate his fundamental natural rights.

History belies those who insist that one must have "qualifications" and a "proper education" in order to conduct scientific inquiry and acquire practical knowledge to benefit humankind. Thomas Edison had no formal education in the sciences, yet he was one of the most productive scientific geniuses in history. The Wright brothers invented the airplane without the dubious "benefit" of a degree in aeronautical engineering. Arthur Jones has probably contributed more of value to the science of exercise than all NSCA certified trainers put together, without the dubious benefit of a degree in exercise science. Historically advances in the sciences have most often are authored not by "qualified" specialists but by "unqualified" generalists whose insight is due to the fact that they did not have the "required" education and consequently were capable of seeing things in a way different from the prevailing and "approved" point of view.

Licensing Does Not Protect the Consumer

Generally, the advocates of professional licensure assert that their brand of practice is the only rational scientific and "good quality" brand, therefore it should be the only brand allowed, "to protect the consumer" from charlatans and quacks.

Now if the Rolls Royce company petitioned the government to get an exclusive license to produce automobiles, and argued that no other automobile manufacturers should be allowed, on the grounds that the Rolls Royce is the only "good quality" automobile available, and that other manufacturers are "quacks", would you think that the primary aim of the Rolls Royce company was to protect the consumer?

Far from altruistic benevolence ('consumer protection'), the primary aim of licensing is to achieve a State-enforced monopoly over a market, to use military might to force everyone to purchase only one brand of a product or service from a single supplier or trade union, and to outlaw competitors. That means: licensing laws enable a minority to hold a tyranny over the majority.

As Nobel Laureate and laissez faire economist Dr. Milton Friedman notes: "There is no occupation so remote that an attempt has not been made to restrict its practice by licensure...The justification offered is always the same: to protect the consumer. However, the reason is demonstrated by observing who lobbies at the state legislature for the imposition or strengthening of licensure. The lobbyists are invariably representatives of the occupation in question rather than of the customers. True enough, plumbers presumably know better than anyone else what their consumers need to be protected against. However, it is hard to regard altruistic concern for their customers as the primary motive behind their determined efforts to get legal power to decide who may be a plumber."[3]

The people do not campaign for restriction of brands on the market (licensing) because they are a diverse group. They do not all have the same needs and values, therefore they do not all want the same brand. The consumer decides what brand of product or service to purchase based on his knowledge, values, and economic status. Neither trade unions nor manufacturers nor representatives of the State have any right to use the State's police (military) power to force everyone to purchase only the brands of services or goods that they have "approved".

As for quality control and consumer protection, the State is not effective in consumer protection anyway. For example, allopathic medicine is licensed, in many U.S. states to the exclusion of all other medical approaches (such as naturopathic or Oriental medicine), yet the A.M.A. itself has admitted that in 1994 alone 106, 000 people were killed and many more were injured by drugs properly prescribed by licensed physicians.[4]

Licensing laws actually foster this kind of disaster. Since alternative medicine-i.e. competition-is not allowed, people have no alternative but to go to allopaths, who in turn are trained and expected to do exactly what is approved by the State Medical Board, even if it is unscientific and results in injury or death for a myriad of people. So long as the treatment offered is State Medical Board approved standard practice, no one is liable for malpractice.

If the NSCA were allowed to set the standards for personal training in the U.S., trainers would be allowed and even encouraged to prescribe performance of ballistic exercise movements, movements against resistance performed on an unstable Swiss ball, plyometrics, and many other methods known by laws of physics to be highly dangerous. Many people might suffer severe and perhaps permanent musculoskeletal injuries. However, since the methods would be among those approved by the NSCA and the State, the consumer would have no recourse. If he sought another opinion, it would be hard to find, as by law the only trainers available would be trainers educated by the NSCA.

Furthermore, licensing enables the members of the trade union to enrich themselves at the consumer's expense. For example, the American Medical Association restricts the number of students allowed into, thus the number of graduates of approved programs, thus the number of physicians available. Thus they create a scarcity of medical professionals, but a high demand for medical services exists. Due to the law of supply and demand, the A.M.A. is able to keep the price of their services artificially high. The members of the union get a higher wage than the free market would allow, and the consumer pays for it out of his much lower wage.

What will happen when licensing is eliminated? Consumers, consumer groups, private associations, and competition in an open market will do the regulating. Private consumer protection groups and voluntary certification by private associations are sufficient to help the public identify safe and effective methods and competent practitioners. Private certification bodies can (will) set high standards for membership and certification without depriving anyone of his right to learn or work in the manner he deems to be in his own best interest.

The public will then serve as the final judge of the value of such certification. Instead of being forced to go to only those who have State approved certification, the people will shop around and spend their money where ever they find the best value, just as in any other free market enterprise.

The people will naturally seek out the safest, most effective, most economical options available, whether they seek treatment for disease or personal training. Unsafe methods and unscrupulous practitioners will quickly get what they deserve, a bad reputation. Those medical practitioners or personal trainers who are able to offer the best quality services for the lowest price will thrive; those who are dangerous, inept or inefficient will not. As a result, the supply of economical and high quality services would greatly increase.

This perspective is supported by Dr. Friedman. When asked what one thing he would do to improve health in America, he said "It's very simple. No more licensing of doctors. No more regulation of drugs. Not of any kind. Period."[5] I have no doubt he would say the same about personal training-the way to improve the quality of the market is to let the consumers do the regulation-if they are allowed to seek their own happiness, they will support what serves them and let die what does not.

Licensing is Unconstitutional

Few people know that licensing and regulation of professions is not a power given to the State by the U.S. constitution. In fact, the U.S. courts in the 19th century consistently stated that licensing of professions is a violation of the 5th amendment, which guarantees the individual's natural right to life, liberty and property. Under the law, your primary property is your own labor, which you have the right to trade in the market, by forming contracts with other individuals, and your pursuit of happiness includes "the right to pursue any lawful business or vocation, in any manner not inconsistent with the equal rights of others."

In Butcher's Union vs. Crescent City Company, 111 US 764 (1883) the U.S. Supreme Court ruled: "The right to follow any common occupations of life is an inalienable right...this right is a large ingredient in the civil liberty of the citizen. To deny it to all but a few favored individuals, by investing the latter with a monopoly, is to invade one of the fundamental privileges of the citizen, contrary not only to common right, but...to the express words of the Constitution."

In Smith vs. Texan, 233 US 631 (1941), the Court declared: "In so far as a man is deprived of the right to labor, his liberty is restricted, his capacity to earn wages is lessened, and he is denied the protection which the law affords...Liberty means more than freedom from servitude, and the Constitutional guarantee is an assurance that the citizen shall be protected in the right to use his powers of mind and body in any lawful calling."

Another Supreme Court decision (Hale vs. Hinkel 201 US 43) stated: "The individual is entitled to carry on his private business in his own way. His power to contract is unlimited. He owes no duty to the state or to his neighbor to divulge his business or to open his doors to an investigation, so far as it may tend to incriminate him. He owes no duty to the state, since he receives nothing therefrom..."

Writing on this subject, Benedict D. LaRosa comments: "The federal government is restricted to those powers enumerated in the U.S. Constitution as stated in the 9th and 10th Amendments. The power to license natural occupations is not one of them. In addition, Article I, Section 10 of the Constitution prohibits the sate from impairing the obligation of contracts between sovereign individuals engaged in a lawful activity. Every state constitution contains a similar provision."

"That governments get away with licensing natural occupations is a testimony to the ignorance and non-vigilance of the people. It represents the triumph of irresponsibility and selfishness over liberty and self-government."[6]

References
1. Williams R. Nutrition Against Disease (Putnam, 1971), p. 7.
2. Dossey L. "On Double-Blinds and Double Standards: A Response to the Recent New England Journal Editorial," Alternative Therapies, November 1998, Vol. 4. No.6, p. 18.
3. Friedman M and Friedman R. Free To Choose (Avon, 1979), p. 229.
4. Dossey, op. cit., p. 20.
5. Pearson D and Shaw S. Freedom of Informed Choice: FDA vs. Nutrient Supplements (Common Sense Press, 1993), p. 52.
6. LaRosa, B. "The Truth About Licensing," Health Freedom News, April/May 1992, p.18-19.