Hair-braiders' occupational regulation - if it is not constitutional in Texas, it shouldn't be in Iowa, Arkansas and Washington. The doomsday of occupational regulation is a-coming?

On January 5, 2015, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas has struck attempts of regulation by the Texas Board of Licensing and Regulation to regulate hair-braiders.

Texas, both through state and federal courts, seems to be leading the way in occupational deregulation.  In June of 2015 the State Supreme Court of Texas has struck as unconstitutional, on state constitutional grounds, eyebrow threading regulation - I wrote about it earlier in this blog, here and here.

Non-sensical hair-braiding regulation of hair-braiding has already been mocked by Jon Stewart in his Comedy Central show, possibly, that's why courts and judges who do not want to become the laughinstock of the nation, start striking down hairbraiding regulations - as the Western District of Texas federal court did.  I guess, comedians should take more court cases, it will greatly improve the quality of constitutional precedents in this country.

Hair-braiders challenged regulation of their 5000-year old trade with imposition of unnecessary and expensive training, office and equipment requirements that are not needed for the actual hair-braiding in Arkansas, Washington and in Iowa.

It is interesting to see how the predominantly white federal courts will decide this predominantly African-American hairstyling regulation.

It is also illustrative that individuals and businesses start to increasingly take the alleged "government regulation boards" to court to strike down attempts of private interest groups to quash competition, deprive people of their livelihoods and decimate consumer choices for more diverse and cheaper services.

Since the government, while pretending to fight for "public safety", provides no evidence that public safety suffers, but instead blatantly advances arguments of "rational basis", "purely economic regulation", and "it must be right if the government says so - if if the government decided to favor one group of people over the other with economic favors", and, when regulated occupations have reached over 1/3 of jobs in the U.S. economy 

(as cited in North Carolina Board of Dental Examiners v FTC, a February 2015 U.S. Supreme Court case that stripped dentists of antitrust "state immunity" for their regulating activities) 

and regulation of occupation stifles competition, entrepreneurship and economic development in the U.S., contributing to poverty, economic stagnation and public unrest - occupational deregulation is a writing on the wall, and is coming fast.