California Entrepreneur Who Was Fined $1000 for Drawing Informal Maps without a License Takes Regulatory Board to Court

It’s possible the regulators are just being overzealous. But there’s another possible motive.

Source: California Entrepreneur Who Was Fined $1000 for Drawing Informal Maps without a License Takes Regulatory Board to Court - Foundation for Economic Education

So to make a long story short, some regulatory board in California fined a man $1000 for making informal maps, accusing him of "land surveying". These maps were used by his customers for various reasons (for example, hotels would hand them out to guests to show room locations) but were NOT used or advertised for the purposes that more formal, official maps are required by law for such as surveys.

Why would you need a license for this? Well, you obviously shouldn't. Anarchists and voluntaryists of course would argue you shouldn't need a license in any case but even for those that support regulation there is really zero rational reason here. No possible harm can come from drawing a map and nobody is being protected here, in fact, quite the opposite.

So then what IS their motive here? There really can't be any other reason that to eliminate competition. This is nothing less than government sanctioned mafia. I can only imagine how bad things would get if you simply refused to pay the fine. It should come as no surprise that to get a license is a lengthy and expensive process. Reducing competition will of course result in higher prices. Imagine how much more a hotel would have to pay for guest maps if you had to get them from a licensed land surveyor.

This man did the (hopefully) smart thing and instead of just rolling over, he filed a lawsuit in Federal court against the board for violation of free speech. It's hard to see how he could lose but then I assume this will first be going to a district court in California. I doubt they are very rational either so it will be interesting to see how far this progresses.

The case was filed at the end of September and is currently pending. A preliminary injunction was filed in October. For court documents and more information on the case, see https://ij.org/case/california-mapping/