The board fined the guy for pretending to be a engineer. If the guy just didnt claim to be an engineer then there would be no fine. Either-way we are here and we all presumably read the guys assertions, so no one was stopped from speaking. The guy was only fined for trying to act as if he is an engineer. How do you prove that you are an engineer? The same way that you prove that you are a doctor or pilot or lawyer.
Are saying that no one needs to take a test to prove that they are qualified?
The guy was trying to make a legal argument, and made the claim that he was an engineer. In that setting he should have said that he wasnt a real engineer.
When it comes to doctors and engineers they should prove their qualifications. what if the guys numbers do not add up? Does that matter to you? Or is this really just a subject that you are asserting and the actual details of the case do not matter to you?
How a user with the forum ID of "Freedom from all" can arrive at the conclusion that he has no freedom to express is own description of his skills (an engineer) without being fined is, well, more than a little mind numbing.
But I'm going to be generous and assume you haven't read the op or article (at least not carefully) and are unaware of the circumstances.
1) Mats never claimed to be a licensed or current professional engineer. He has, however, a degree in electrical engineering, and worked for the Swedish Air Force and Luxor Electronics as an engineer.
2) In a free society, Mats is free to describe himself as he pleases. In the land of free speech, as long as he does not defraud someone in claiming he is a licensed engineer in the state of Oregon, "the State" has no right to tell him what opinion on issues of public interest is "acceptable".
3) Mats has filed suit against the Oregon law and has won the first round; the Oregon board lost its fight against a preliminary injunction banning it from fining Mats, and actually admitted it was in violation of the first amendment.
This is not the first time that Oregon has abused human free speech rights in pursuit of their statist ideology of "control"; a state board has issued fines against an activist who criticized a proposed power plant, against a retiree who wrote the Board to complain about his flooded basement, and sent a letter of "concern" to a Portland City Commissioner candidate who called himself an “environmental engineer” (the candidate has engineering degrees from Cornell and MIT but wasn’t an Oregon-licensed professional engineer).
And this form of fascist mentality is not confined to Oregon, in New Orleans, Savannah, and Charleston (SC) "tour guides" have to obtain a license to talk about their local history; North Carolina has stopped a paleo blogger from blogging his advice on diet because he was not a licensed "nutritionist"; Kentucky's state psychology board issued a cease and desist letter to John Rosemond, a nationally syndicated advice columnist, because he was not licensed to practice of psychology in Kentucky.
Scratch a regulator and you will find an authoritarian - someone whose "conception of the State" is as "an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative" to their subordinate "relation to the State." The "State organizes the nation, but leaves a sufficient margin of liberty to the individual; the latter is deprived of all useless and possibly harmful freedom, but retains what is essential; the deciding power in this question cannot be the individual, but the State alone.... "
That is the unconscious (and conscious) mentality of all state regulators; consistent with an apt description of Fascism written by Benito Mussolini.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/instit...light-cameras-oregon-says-yes/2/#3c0d72577f3e
Mats Järlström: I Am an Engineer - IEEE - The Institute