Bureaucrats demand grandma get restaurant license to feed her neighbors breakfast

“The government has no business in your grandma’s kitchen. Now, media outlets nationwide are spreading the word about the Goldwater Institute’s efforts to protect the rights of a Missouri grandma who was threatened by “petty health bureaucrats” for cooking breakfast for her neighbors without the government’s permission.”

“Kathy Kite, who lives in the small town of Harrisburg, Mo., was frightened when she received a letter from county health leaders threatening ‘legal action’ if she didn’t stop inviting neighbors into her home and making them breakfast. Last week, Goldwater intervened, demanding answers from the health leaders about why they believe they have the legal authority to regulate Kathy’s hospitality. Those bureaucrats are demanding that she get a food-service permit and spend tens of thousands of dollars on a commercial kitchen. Kathy’s not backing down: ‘I’m not going to stop feeding my community cause they are my family,’ she said.”

“Attorney attorney Dave Roland, Goldwater’s director of allied litigation, said the hospitality Kathy is showing her neighbors ‘is consistent with the best aspects of American culture and history.’ Thankfully, the Goldwater Institute will always be there when bureaucrats overstep their bounds and trample on Americans’ constitutional rights.”

Read more here.

Licensing didn’t used to be so excessive. Just 4 percent of Americans needed a license to work in 1950. Now, 30 percent of Americans need a occupational license to work.

States stupidly require hairstylists to attend beauty school, rather than just getting on-the-job training. Hairstylists don’t need hundreds of hours of training at a beauty school to do their jobs properly. But states require that anyway, as a condition for hairstylists being allowed to work.

As the Institute for Justices notes, Studies tend to find that licensing requirements increase costs to consumers while not improving the quality of services. Licensing board are often rackets focused on stifling competition rather than protecting consumers.

Three states mandate useless “inclusivity” training for cosmetologists, making it more costly to be a cosmetologist while teaching them useless DEI buzzwords.

The harm from excessive occupational licensing regulations is so obvious that it has been noted by the administrations of Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden, all of which recognized the need to cut back on occupational-licensing restrictions. “During the Obama administration, the Department of Labor and the White House Council of Economic Advisers published a lengthy report on licensing laws, and called for states to take action to remove unnecessary barriers to work. ‘Licensing restrictions cost millions of jobs nationwide and raise consumer expenses by over one hundred billion dollars,’ it concluded.”

The Trump administration also recognized the harm of occupational licensing, saying that “the cost and complexity of licensing creates an economic barrier for Americans seeking a job” and “a barrier for Americans that move from state to state.” Excessive occupational licensing also drives up the rate of theft and property crimes by increasing joblessness.

Kamala Harris also called for cutting back on occupational-licensing regulations in her 2024 presidential campaign.

Matt Yglesias describes how “beauty schools are ripping off their students. Terrible licensing rules deserve some of the blame.” He cites a New York Times article “about beauty schools that leave their students drowning in debt rather than opening up” job opportunities, thanks to “occupational licensing” rules.

As Yglesias points out, mandatory-school-attendance requirements for barbers and hair-stylists make no sense. Indeed, such attendance requirements make no sense even for occupations where public safety is at issue and some form of licensing may thus be justified (comically, defenders of beauty-school attendance mandates depict hair-styling as being a dangerous occupation where licensing is needed due to the presence of chemicals in hair treatments). As he notes, it makes more sense to require competency to be shown

purely through certification. In other words: You need to be able to pass the test. In that world, a beauty school can stay in business if and only if it offers a cost-effective training regime. Beauty schools would need to compete with efforts at self-instruction or with apprenticeship arrangements of various kinds. Instead, by requiring the 1,000 hours of training, the state licensing board creates a cozy business for the beauty schools. They become for-profit gatekeepers to economic opportunity. And their incentive structure isn’t to focus on effective education—the quality of the teaching is irrelevant to the business model. It’s to focus on maximizing the amount of money extracted from the students.

Many occupations that are now licensed do not need to be licensed to protect anyone. And the few that do, tend to have excessive requirements for getting a license:

“Licensing is a barrier to entry for all Americans looking for work in certain professions, but it’s particularly pernicious for those on the lower end of the economic ladder. For example, getting a license to cut hair can require more than a year of expensive schooling in some states, while becoming an interior designer in places like Florida requires more than 2,000 days (yes, days!) of training. There’s little evidence that licensing those professions does much of anything to protect public health and safety.

“Once you have a license, you might be stuck in the state where you earned it. A 2015 study by the Brookings Institution found that licensed workers were less likely to migrate between states, but not necessarily because people are happy in those places. Instead, researchers say workers feel locked in place because most state-issued professional licenses are not transferable, so moving out-of-state means you’d be out of business unless you can obtain a new license in your new home.”