Hey, John Hickenlooper is the governor and it’s his state agency that’s doing the crackdown on yoga certification*. Or should it be shakedown? – Because there’s apparently money in regulating this.
Teacher-training programs that are required to be certified must pay fees to the state. The state charges $1,750 for an initial provisional certificate that is good for up to two years, then $1,500 for a renewable certificate good for three years. It also charges $175 for every “agent” authorized to enter into a contract with a student, plus $3.75 per student per quarter. In addition, schools that have been certified must secure a minimum bond of $5,000, which is based on the amount of tuition collected.
You gotta wonder what the victory condition for Colorado is for this one. I mean, liberals like yoga, right? And Hickenlooper’s a liberal. You’d think that he’d do the smart thing and take this as an opportunity to get rid of a stupid set of regulations… and, yes, this is stupid. A remarkable amount of our licensing regime is based on the twin engines of stupidity and laziness: people write a quick regulation instead of making a specific, circumstances-based decision; and then other people expand that regulation to cover something that it had no business covering. Happens. All the. Time.
So good job, Gov. Hickenlooper. You keep finding those enemies of the State! …As I said: he’s the governor. Fish rots from the head down, and all that.
Via @Aaron_RS.
Moe Lane (crosspost)
*To be fair, this program started up in 2002, under a Republican governor. To be equally fair, nobody enforced the dumb thing for a decade because it’s yoga.
you mention stupidity and laziness… but leading that team like Rudolph will always be money. for The Good of The People, of course. who knows what an unlicensed yoga instructor might do to people?
A license to show people how to stretch?
If you wanted to find the poster child for an anti-big-government campaign you could stop searching here.
Hickenlooper has to do something. Consider, he totally backed the gun seizure laws the Democrats passed. He was funded by the Bloomberg Foundation. He went out of his way to insult the combined Sheriffs of Colorado, personally about their opposition. And has been forced to claim that he did not realize that there was opposition and tried to blame the entire series of laws in violation of the State and Federal Constitution on an unnamed aide. This after we recalled two Democrat State Senators, forced another to resign rather than be recalled; all with the Colorado REPUBLICAN party opposing the recall movement.
The problems we are having with the legalization of marijuana [tax receipts far lower than promised, costs far higher than promised (and more than the receipts), illegal commercial growers who do not get either licenses or pay taxes or follow the law in the sure and certain knowledge that they are above the law, private growers “for their own use” in large quantities that are selling it untaxed below the legal price, Mexican cartels moving grow operations here (they are in my county), water being stolen from the rightful owners by growers (water rights are a BIG thing here, we are alpine desert); all with the state, the Feds, and definitely the District Attorneys (who are being paid off) each claiming that no one has the authority to enforce the law.] are such that he is now claiming that he was always totally opposed to the legalization when the truth is just the opposite.
What is a Leftist, hipster Democrat to do? If he can’t screw up the state; at least he can find some group to oppress. And since yoga teachers are by their nature pacifist and have no real link to conservatives who fight back, they are the perfect target.
“A remarkable amount of our licensing regime is based on the twin engines of stupidity and laziness”
I don’t generally give states the benefit of the doubt here. This was probably yet another case where entrenched interests pushed for this to keep upstarts out. I don’t have any knowledge of this case either way, but I am willing to believe that’s how it originated.