I'm beginning to think that the answer is no. From the Carteret News-Times, reprinted at FryingPanTower.com (Fishing License Debate Ahead):
State Rep. Jean Preston, R-Carteret, pledged Thursday to continue to try to improve or defeat what she considers badly flawed legislation to amend the not-yet-enacted saltwater recreational fishing license approved by the General Assembly last year.
As it stands, NC is the only Atlantic or Gulf coast state that does not have a saltwater recreational fishing license.
The benefits of a fishing license are several:
- License fees act as a user fee and help ration the scarce fishery resource to those who are most willing and able to pay to fish (although the cost is so low not much rationing takes place): "The coastal license would be $15 a year for residents and $5 for short-term permits."
- The license raises revenue that can be used by an underfunded agency, the NC Division of Marine Fisheries (DMF), to help enforce existing commercial and recreational regulations, conduct research and do other things: "Revenues from the new license expected to reach $19.4 million or more the first year ...."
- License data would help the DMF know how many anglers are out there so that they can better manage the resource: "... it would generate data officials say is needed to better manage fish stocks."
Some background: Why is government needed? One situation where markets don't do a good job of organizing economic activity (i.e., in jargon: "fail to allocate resources efficiently") is with fisheries. Fish are open access resources, no one owns them until they catch them. This provides incentives for people to race to try to catch as many fish as they can before their competitors get them. This creates an overfishing problem, fish stocks crash, etc. [Reference: The Tragedy of the Commons, by Garrett Hardin, 1968.]
Back to the goofiness in NC. Why doesn't NC have a recreational license? One reason is that the politically powerful (at least in NC) commercial fishing industry strongly opposes the license:
... many if not most commercial fishermen oppose it, contending it will increase the power of the recreational fishing industry at the expense of the struggling commercial industry.
Go to the NC Fisheries Association's op-ed page and scroll down.
A second reason is ... the license fee is a tax!
"The first two or three years I was in the General Assembly, I’d make it a point during the fishing season to go out on the beach in Atlantic Beach, Indian Beach/Salter Path and Emerald Isle to talk to people," [Preston] said. "I’d encounter people carrying buckets and fishing polls, and I’d approach them and introduce myself and ask ... how they felt about paying $15 so they could fish. You wouldn’t believe the reactions and responses I got.*
"Most of the people, what they said was something like, ‘You people up in the legislature, all you want to do is raise more money so you can spend more,’" Rep. Preston said. "All you want is another tax."
Has society gotten to the point where any tax, whether $15 or $1500, must be opposed on philosophical/ideological grounds?
Also:
She also derided the Senate bill for charging $1 to people who want to fish from their own property.
"That just doesn’t make any sense," she said. "Why do you want to charge someone a dollar to walk out his back door and throw a line in the water? And if you are going to make that person get a license, why $1?"
This is an easy one. Because, Rep. Preston, people own their land but not the water that the land touches.
*Note: I'm a co-author on a paper that was published in Marine Resource Economics in 2001: "Willingness to pay for a saltwater recreational fishing licence" [link to PDF]. We also walked along the beach, piers, etc and talked to people who were fishing to find out what they thought about the $15 fee. We found that the average willingness to pay for the license is $60.
