Required
Reading for 2004 Essay Contest
The
Role Of Government
War unleashes powerful centralizing forces in nations, and from the Civil War through the Cold War it was the principal cause of the concentration of government power in Washington. Which may partly explain why in 1942, with war freshly upon the nation, the Supreme Court ruled as it did in the case of Wickard v Filburn. …
Filburn was an Ohioan caught in the toils of federal agriculture policy. In 1933 Congress passed an anti-Depression measure called the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which sought to stabilize commodity prices by restricting production. In 1936…the Supreme Court struck down that Act on the ground that the federal government was prohibited from regulating production by the Tenth Amendment, which says: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”
But the Court’s composition changed, and one justice began reading the Constitution by flickering light of election returns. So there came to be another Agricultural Adjustment Act, which authorized the setting of production quotas not only for wheat sold into interstate commerce but also for wheat that was consumed on the farm as food or seed or feed for poultry and livestock. Filburn thought that this provision, as a putative exercise by the federal government of its power to regulate interstate commerce, was a bit thick. So he produced 269 bushels of wheat in excess of his quota for use as chicken feed on his farm, and refused to pay the stipulated penalty. The case reached the Supreme Court, which used it to further dismantle the constitutional doctrine (a.k.a. the Framers’ design) that the federal government is a government of limited and enumerated powers.
The Court upheld the provision, arguing that the cumulative effect of even minor and local economic activities can have interstate consequences---rather like the butterfly in Brazil, the beating of whose wings has some effect, indiscernible but supposedly real, on Detroit’s weather. The Court said that even if wheat such as Filburn’s bushels never goes to market, “it supplies a need of the man who grew it which would otherwise be reflected by purchases in the supermarket. Home-grown wheat in this sense competes with wheat in commerce.” And if wheat prices rise, many farmers like Filburn might send their wheat grown for home use to market after all, upsetting the government’s plans.
Clearly this was a far cry from what the Constitution’s Framers had in mind when they reassured various state ratifying conventions that the new central government would be limited to powers enumerated in the document, and would be further limited by various amendments, one of which became the Tenth. What happened to cause that amendment to become “to the Constitution what the Chicago Cubs are to the World Series---of only occasional appearance and little consequence”?
The Constitution’s enumeration of limited powers turned out to be unconfining, particularly when construed by people eager to augment national power. In the hands of people unsympathetic to decentralization, the enumerated power to, for example, tax and spend for “the genera welfare” is not very limiting. So whatever power the Tenth Amendment has in any epoch is less as a leash that enforces particular behavior on the federal government than as the Framers’ endorsement of a general predilection for decentralization.
That predilection got run over by a steam locomotive. Michael Rothschild, president of The Bionomics Institute in San Francisco, locates a crucial constitutional turning point in an economic development---the founding in 1828 of America’s first railroad, the Baltimore & Ohio. “Unavoidably,” writes Rothschild, “the rise of the railroads undermined the decentralized vision of America’s Founders.” The private power of national enterprises shaping national markets caused many Americans to think nationally and to regard states’ powers as feeble anachronisms. Another development with constitutional consequences was intellectual. It was the cult of science, of modernity, of expert elites that seized the nation’s imagination early in the 20th century and favored the concentration of government power.
Rothschild suggests that the revival of the constitutional theory of decentralization was fostered by a scientific event in 1971---Intel Corporation’s introduction of the first microprocessor. A decade later there were millions of such slivers of silicon in personal computers and millions more in fax machines, cell-phones, voice-mail systems and other devices. In 1989 fax and e-mail traffic soared. Rothschild writes that the Information Age began in earnest as the Berlin Wall, symbol of the century’s centralizing tendencies gone mad, collapsed. So today people sitting in bed at midnight in Arizona shop by telephone at L.L. Bean in Maine, and suburbs and rural areas are rapidly gaining jobs and the centralizing impulse is a spent force.
Small wonder, says Rothschild, that the Clintons’ health care plan, “the next logical step in the consolidation of federal power,” was unappealing. Centrally designed and controlled social policies no longer imply rationality and fairness but “bureaucracy, Kafkaesque regulation and one-size-fits-all mass production.” He suggests a test: “If you had to trace a missing package, would you rather deal with the U.S. Post Office or Federal Express? If you had to correct an error on your retirement account, would you rather deal with Social Security or your mutual fund?”
Today the Framers’ constitutional vision of decentralized governance, until quite recently regarded as a quaint antique, is being rejuvenated by modernity. Thus do arguments acquire momentum from events.”
Excerpts from page 3-S of a National Review Supplement (date unknown) which contains an introduction by Wick Allison, Publisher.
“The historic events of …1989 are behind us: Communism as an ideology is dead. Now the courageous men and women of Central Europe, of the Baltic states, of the great but submerged nations of Georgia and Ukraine, even of Russia herself, must bend their backs to the hard task of lifting off the huge carcass of bureaucracy that is socialism’s instrument…
It will not be easy. It may in fact, prove impossible. To see how gargantuan a task it is, we only have to look at New York’s rent-control laws, imposed in 1943 as a temporary wartime measure. Every responsible person in New York knows rent control does not work. Even the New York Times now says rent control does not work. Not only doesn’t it work, Richard Brookhiser points out to us that its effect is the opposite of its intent: instead of maintaining affordable housing for the working poor, it causes a diminution of the housing stock, especially of the low-cost housing which the poor of New York desperately need.
So why hasn’t rent control in New York been abolished? For a very simple and altogether human reason. The people who were lucky enough twenty or thirty years ago to move into a rent-controlled apartment, and who now enjoy rents as low as 10 percent of the market price, are not about to give them up. Far from abolishing classes, socialism creates new ones. Far from abolishing privilege, socialism shuffles the deck and deals a new hand. The problem, of course, is that then the game stops.
So we can watch and marvel and help when possible as the newly freed peoples of Eastern and Central Europe wrestle with their burden. But as the horror stories about obstruction and paralysis and economic despair continue to pour out, we should refrain from clucking.
We should, instead, perk up and take a good, hard look around us. History is trying to tell us something.
Obstruction and paralysis and economic despair: Have you ever been to your county’s welfare office? Or walked door to door in your town’s housing projects? Have you ever tried to solve a problem with your mother’s Social Security check? Or tried to help an employee get a green card? …
Americans routinely tolerate conditions that would have been unthinkable only a generation ago. It is no surprise that these conditions are accompanied by (caused by?) a spiritual impoverishment that undermines the very notion of responsible citizenship. …Ideas have consequences…and if reform is to be made possible, it must begin with those in the business of promulgating ideas.
From the January 1991 issue of The Freeman entitled “Mises: The Impact of Ideas” by William H. Peterson:
“Take the Marxist idea of class conflict, for example, and the Mises idea in response. In a [1961] article…Mises takes Marx to task. Mises notes how the emerging market or contractual society of some two or three centuries ago soon obliterated the class lines drawn be serfdom and slavery.
Yet [he] maintains class or status survives today only by government fiat in such dubious taxonomy and forms as subsidies (which views farmers, for example, as a class), discriminatory taxation (which converts, among others, smokers, drinkers, and the rich into classes), affirmative action (which converts race and gender into classes), and union privileges (which transform employees into a class). So classes today become legal fictions and, by law, social frictions. In this sense, Marx’s class struggle does persist… [but] Mises [saw] that Marx had painted himself into a corner, simply unable to put forth a credible definition of classes in a capitalistic age. …
[Keynesian Economics]
Harvard Professor [Alvin] Hansen upholds the concept of counter-cyclical macro-demand management by the government, dwells on such supposed causal factors as general overinvestment and overproduction (thereby ignoring the insight of classical economist Jean Baptiste Say and his Law of Markets), and castigates those who see credit expansion and inflation as the underlying causes of the cycle.
Rebuts Mises with a better idea: “People must learn that the only means to avoid the recurrence of economic catastrophes is to let the market—and not the government---determine interest rates. There is but one pattern of positive counter-cyclical policies, viz., not to increase the quantity of money in circulation and bank deposits subject to check. Deficit spending by borrowing from the commercial banks is the surest way toward economic disaster.” …
Or consider the idea of land reform now so pertinent in an era when private property rights throughout the West are still unclear, when further decisions on just how to reallocate---hopefully, to privatize---the huge, literally millions of square miles of formerly state-held lands of Eastern Europe, including the Soviet Union, have to be made. Too, land reform is still a major issue in much of Latin America where landlords continue to operate large coffee, sugar, banana, and other plantations. …
Mises says the program of land reform, including confiscation and redistribution---usually in small equal parcels to the “peasants” or “citizens”---no longer makes sense in a capitalistic market economy. He observes how in a market society the consumers daily vote anew on just who should own or not own the factors of production, including land. All on a voluntary basis.
Thus by their buying or abstention from buying, the consumers decide who should be allowed to be entrepreneurs and who should supply the other productive factors of land, labor, and capital. In other words, the consumers determine just who should operate the factors in the best and cheapest way for the satisfaction of their own wishes and needs.
Entrepreneurs and other land and non-land factor owner/operators who do not measure up to these consumer wishes and needs are in effect assigned losses and soon turn to other pursuits. Factory owners who do measure up are rewarded with profits or other returns and so tend to expand their operations. It follows that economic resources flow toward their social optimum and that the consumer is not only sovereign, but a dictator as well: ruthlessly direct, sparing no one, least of all the landowners however large. …
The following are the words of writer Bettina Bien Greaves, found at the end of this article:
“One recurring theme throughout Mises’ writings is that men act on the basis of ideas. Today is the product of past ideas. And the ideas of today will produce tomorrow. The idea that government has the power to cure almost any social ill permitted big government to triumph throughout the world. To reverse this trend, to create a world of free markets, to change governments, to repeal government programs, the ideas men hold must be changed.”
The following articles are taken from Congressional Quarterly Weekly
FLURRY OF
PAPERWORK TURNING INTO BLIZZARD
By Mike Christensen
Soon after they took over Congress in 1995, Republicans decreed that the burden
of filling out federal paperwork had to be eased. Instead, according to a new
General Accounting Office report, it has increased.
In
fiscal 2000, in fact, federal paperwork increased by a net of nearly 180 million
"burden hours," the second largest yearly gain since the law (PL 104-13) was
passed.
A
burden hour is supposed to measure the time it takes to collect data and fill
out federal forms, surveys and reports.
Though the measurement has been used for half a century, the GAO remarked to a
House Government Reform subcommittee April 24 that the burden hour's
relationship to the real burden "is unclear."
Nevertheless, the main engine of these burden hours is the Internal Revenue
Service, which, according to the GAO, is responsible for 83 percent of the
paperwork load, followed at a great distance by the departments of Labor,
Transportation and Health and Human Services and the Environmental Protection
Agency.
Though some agencies reduced their paperwork burdens in fiscal 2000—the Federal
Trade Commission and the Defense and Transportation departments—the IRS's
estimate for fiscal 2000 increased by 240 million burden hours over fiscal 1999.
The
culprits: changes in tax forms 1040 and 1040A. (The second is the short form.)
Under the law, the Office of Management and Budget is supposed to keep the
flurry of forms in check.
NOMINEE'S
FAITH IN RISK ANALYSIS SHARPENS DEBATE ON RULEMAKING PROCESS
Editor's note: Professor
Graham
To
his supporters, John D. Graham, the soft-spoken Harvard professor nominated to
head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, is an academic who will
apply common-sense evaluations to the regulations issued by more than 50 federal
agencies, ensuring that government resources are applied wisely. They say it
makes no sense to spend taxpayers' dollars on problems that may be far less
dangerous than perceived.
To
his opponents, Graham is someone who will use a patina of science to block
government rules needed to protect Americans from health, safety and
environmental hazards.
Graham is getting attention because he is one of the foremost proponents of
"risk analysis"—which calculates the likelihood of a hazard against the costs
and benefits of preventing it. Every major government regulation overturned or
created by the Bush administration would go through his agency, which is part of
the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
Robert W. Hahn, director of the American Enterprise Institute Brookings
Institution Join Center for Regulatory Studies, says Graham will use "the same
[critical] people use every day" to make decisions. "When you think about
crossing the street, you [weigh] the increased risk of an accident against the
benefit of getting to the other side," he said.
But
Joan Claybrook, president of the consumers group Public Citizen, questions the
research techniques used by Graham, director of Harvard's Center for Risk
Analysis. "The problems with his methodology is that it's garbage in, garbage
out," she said. "It's not a neutral evaluation; it's policy-driven toward a
predetermined finding."
Sally Katzen, administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs
under President Bill Clinton, does not believe Graham will drive the agency into
a stark anti-regulatory stance.
"Can [risk analysis] be manipulated for ulterior motives? Sure," said Katzen.
"Do I suspect that's what the office is going to do? I don't, actually ... He's
not a madman or an ideologue by a longshot."
Everyone involved in the regulatory debate agrees that Graham will have one of
the most politically sensitive jobs in the administration if he is confirmed by
the Senate, as most observers expect.
"This executive office is pure hell," said Gary Bass, director of OMB Watch, a
public interest group that has been monitoring the agency since the Reagan
administration.
"You're hit by the politics of the president. You're hit by demands from
industry, public interests, Congress, not to mention the agencies—and almost all
of those people have different perspectives. Because of the high stakes, you
always end up alienating someone," he said.
Cost and Benefits
Graham argues that risk analysis is a
valuable tool in setting budget and policy priorities, and that it makes sense
to use systematic methods to figure out whether a perceived threat or hazard is
real. He also believes new risks may be created when regulations are issued to
fix a problem.
"The basic problem we face as citizens and as policymakers is a distortion of
priorities," Graham told the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee in 1995, when
he was testifying about regulatory overhaul. "We regulate some often tiny or
nonexistent risks too much and ignore larger and better-documented risks."
Critics question the way Graham gauges proposed solutions. Instead of estimating
the number of lives that would be saved by a regulation—one commonly used
standard—Graham tries to determine how many years of life would be saved. That
means, say critics, that he dismisses problems that might not arise for decades
and solutions that might add a few high-quality years to an individual's life.
Wendy Lee Gramm, who headed the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in
the mid-1980s, defends Graham's methodology. "People say, "How can you value a
life?" But the point is, we're always evaluating tradeoffs," said Gramm, now
director of regulatory studies at the Mercatus Center of the George Mason
University in Arlington, Virginia.
"Sometimes it's not life or death; it's just extending a life," said Gramm, who
headed a regulatory agency, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, from 1988
to 1993. "It's not an all-or-nothing decision."
Public Citizen, however, says its criticism of Graham goes beyond his
methods. The group claimed in a March report that he has skewed data to support
the claims of corporate donors to the Harvard center such as Merck & Co., Inc.,
Exxon Mobil Corp., Bethlehem Steel Corp. and the Shell Foundation.
Claybrook takes particular issue with a Harvard center study, released in July,
on motorists' use of cell phones. Researchers, including Graham, said they could
not clearly document how much the risk of an accident increases if a driver is
talking on a cell phone.
"We
simply do not have enough reliable information on which to base reasonable
policy," the study concluded. "Although there is evidence that using a cellular
phone while driving poses risks to both the driver and others, it may be
premature to enact substantial restrictions."
Claybrook believes it is obvious that cell phone regulation would save lives and
notes that the study was funded by a $300,000 contribution from AT&T Wireless
Group.
"It's simplistic and naive to say that the funding automatically corrupts the
findings of the study," said David Ropeik, a spokesman for the Harvard Center
for Risk Analysis. "We are funded by a number of government agencies, but
[critics] don't mention that because it doesn't fit into their thesis.""
Ropeik said the cell phone study was reviewed by outside experts and included a
disclosure of its funding source.
Public-interest groups say they fear a return to the early days of the Reagan
administration, when regulations disappeared down a "black hole" at the Office
of Information and Regulatory Affairs. During that time, congressional Democrats
charged, regulations would go in for review and disappear for months or years
without explanation.
OMB
Watch's Bass said he is also concerned the White House may retreat from the more
open regulatory processes that evolved under Clinton.
"This nominee has to go on record in terms of what kinds of transparency he
would bring to [the agency]," Bass said. "Right now [under Bush], you can't find
out anything. You have no idea what criteria is used for upholding some rules
and withdrawing others."
Congressional critics worry Graham will be reluctant to allow any rules to go
forward. Cost "could lead you always to say no" to regulations, said Henry A.
Waxman of California, ranking Democrat on the House Government Reform Committee.
"Not only has the administration acted so far in complete disregard for the
views of the public, but they're also putting people in place like Graham, who
will continue that pattern," Waxman said.
Some Democrats on the Senate Government Affairs Committee are eager to quiz
Graham, who joined OMB as a consultant in mid-March and has been visiting
Capitol Hill regularly to seek political guidance from his allies and a chance
to plead his case before skeptics.
"Based on what I've read about Mr. Graham, we're going to take a very close look
at his philosophy, his research [and] the impact of h is views about rules and
regulations on health and safety," said Sen. Richard J. Durbin, D-Illinois
Still, Graham is expected to be confirmed easily with the support of Democrats
such as Carl Levin of Michigan. Three years ago, when Levin and Chairman Fred
Thompson, R-Tennessee, were pushing for a bill that would require agencies to
include risk analysis when writing regulations, Graham testified in favor of
their proposal. The measure was reported out of committee but the GOP leadership
opted against bringing it to the floor.
Graham's Agenda
Every president since Jimmy Carter has
ordered federal agencies to weigh potential costs and benefits when writing a
rule. Today, every major regulation with an economic impact of more than $100
million must undergo a formal cost-benefit evaluation.
It
is more difficult to evaluate risks, however. Many agencies try to determine the
likelihood that a particular hazard could occur when formulating regulations—but
there are no government standards about whether or how to use risk analysis.
Graham would likely change that. Over the past decade, he has repeatedly
testified before Congress about problems in the current rule-making process. In
1995 testimony before a House Commerce subcommittee, Graham outlined suggestions
to update the system. They included:
•
"Broad-based rankings of health, safety and environmental risks that cut across
the jurisdictions of existing agencies" and "could help inform the budgetary
allocations of Congress and OMB."
• A
mechanism "to make sure that the findings of benefit-cost analyses are actually
used by federal agencies when making specific rulemaking decisions."
•
Stronger White House oversight of federal agencies. "No significant risk
assessment should be published by a federal agency without the opportunity for
review by an interagency panel of experts under the leadership of the executive
office of the president," said Graham.
American Enterprise Institute Brookings analyst Hahn predicts that Graham's
interest in more risk analysis will have two main effects on government policy.
"The administration will be less likely to pass regulations that would be
burdensome to the average consumer, and ... there will be greater attention to
achieving the same objectives in less costly ways," Hahn said. "We'll see costs
more seriously considered."
A
former OMB administrator says Graham's toughest task may be confronting the
tension that has always existed between his office and regulatory agencies.
"A
lot of agencies have bureaucratic staff with their own agenda and special
interests," said James C. Miller III, who headed OMB under Reagan.
"Graham is going to make sure that he has a lot of clout in the White House so
that when there's a confrontation with an agency—and there is always some sort
of defining showdown—he will win."
DEAL
FALLS THROUGH ON ERGONOMICS RULES
CQ
Almanac 2000 November 4, 2000 page
2-111
Occupational
Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has been at work on regulations to limit
injuries or disabilities from performing repetitive tasks ... The [regulations]
would require that 1.6 million employers set up programs to limit the repetitive
motion injuries of about 27 million workers—from airport cargo handlers to
automobile assembly line workers, and from grocery checkout clerks to textile
mill weavers. Another 300,000 businesses each year would have to act the first
time a worker suffered a job-related repetitive stress disorder that required
medical treatment, reassignment to light duty or time off ... Business groups
say the pending rules' breadth and vagueness would drive up their cost of
compliance—their estimates range from $14 billion to $80 billion a year—and
would wrongly cut into business productivity and profitability. OSHA and Labor
Department officials, meanwhile, say the rule is intended to be flexible and
would not require most companies to act. While costing employers $4.2 billion
annually, they say, the rule would also save them $9 billion a year in lost
productivity. This is the argument embraced by labor as well.
In the
drive to reshape federal rules, executive branch is seen as the path of least
resistance
THE ANTI-FUN
POLICE ARE WATCHING
Should government be in the business of regulating rollerblading and
bungee-jumping? OK, how about hopscotch?
By Jonathan
Walters
Governing March 3, 1993 p. 23
As
if Big Government didn't have a bad enough reputation, it seems that a growing
number of states and localities just don't want some people to have any fun.
Skateboarders are being banned from public plazas. Bungee-jumpers are being
grounded. Whitewater-rafting companies are being scrutinized for tougher
regulation, and so are rock-climbing schools. Even rollerbladers are being
slapped with fines in some jurisdictions for the transgression of being neither
car nor pedestrian, but a legally unacceptable combination of the two.
The
curmudgeon capital of the country, though, has to be Charlestown, Indiana. There
it is now illegal to play hopscotch, soccer, baseball or basketball in streets,
alleys or even on sidewalks. Scofflaw tykes can be slapped with a $100 fine.
There is now provision—yet—for requiring them to finish their vegetables, as
well.
What prompted Charlestown's wave of cranky rule making? "There was a group of
kids regularly playing basketball in the streets," says Mayor Bob Braswell. "The
city attorney said we couldn't discriminate against just them." So the city made
its ban as broad as possible. Braswell hints that the ban will be very
selectively policed.
But
while that may be the current intention, such ordinances have a way of taking on
a life of their own, many years after being passed, points out David Cooper, who
monitors government activity affecting rollerbladers for the International
In-Line Skating Association.
Rollerbladers have been getting pulled over mostly because of a wave of
anti-roller skating laws passed in the 1970s aimed at keeping young kids and
their clamp-on skates off the streets and out of harm's way. Cooper argues that
rollerbladers are a whole new breed of skater—most of them adults, at that.
Ancient ordinances notwithstanding, there does seem to be some other force at
work here. Some insist that government is just doing its job, protecting people
from public nuisances and unscrupulous thrill-providers who don't take proper
safety precautions. Others fret about what they see as the creeping influence of
self-appointed safety types out to protect fun-seekers from themselves.
The
extent to which that is a property role for government has long been debated
among public officials, of course. In Vermont, bungee-jumping outfits may have
to get certified, but if people want to leap, it's their business, thinks
Vermont Governor Howard Dean, who, in an interview with the Burlington Free
Press, summed up his sentiment on a possible statewide jumping ban. "You
can't outlaw everything that you think is insane. I suppose people have the
right to do crazy things."
In
Vermont, maybe, but apparently not in that crucible of individual freedom, New
Hampshire, where "Live Free or Die" is stamped on every license plate. The state
has banned all bungee-jumping from balloons and cranes. "It's just like
regulating restaurants," argues Robert E. Dunn Jr., assistant commissioner of
the New Hampshire Department of Safety. "We have to assure the public that it is
safe."
That probably is not the best comparison. After all, who goes to McDonald's for
a burger and a thrill instead of a burger and a shake? Better would be to cite
government's general role in making sure that fly-by-night businesses don't jump
into activities where safety is of paramount concern.
So
give government the benefit of the doubt on bungee-jumping. But rollerblading?
"[Governments] argue that you have hotdogs taking out old ladies," says the
rollerbladers' Cooper. His suggestion is simple and logical: Go after the rogue
skaters, just as you would a lousy driver. Don't broad-brush.
Cooper is confident that rollerbladers will ultimately win the day. "It's
because of our demographics. We're not your screw-the-establishment types. We
carry our cellular phones when we skate."
MONIQUE IN
TANGLES
Wall Street
Journal June 18, 1993
Monique Landers is a 15-year-old high school student who already has her own
small African hair-braiding business. That is she did until six weeks
ago when the state of Kansas shut her down because she didn't have a cosmetology
license.
Monique learned she had to close her business just after she returned from New
York, where she had been honored as one of five Outstanding High School
Entrepreneurs. An official at the Kansas Cosmetology Board read about her award
and promptly demanded that she desist.
Monique started her business in Wichita last year with the help of the National
Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship, NFTE was founded in 1987 by Steve
Mariotti, a New York City businessman who decided after he was mugged that
inner-city youths should be given an alternative to life on the streets. His
program teaches students in 10 cities how to develop a business plan and market
a product or service. A remarkable 84% of graduates report they use the
knowledge to earn money for themselves.
Monique started "A Touch of Class," and began braiding and washing the hair of
friends and family members. She made a profit of about $100 a month.
This was too much for the Kansas Cosmetology Board, which warned her it was
illegal for her to in any way touch hair for profit without a license. If she
didn't stop, they wrote the youngster, she was subject to "a fine or
imprisonment in the county jail or both."
Nancy Shobe, the Board's executive director, says Monique should go to a
yearlong cosmetology school if she wants to braid hair. Monique says few
schools even teach braiding, and anyway none will take her until she turns 17.
"I need to finish school first," she told us. "The Board won't let me earn my
own money, and won't let kids like me learn how to take care of ourselves."
The
Board acted after it received complaints from hair salons and cosmetology
schools. Monique's customers didn't complain. In shutting her down it is doing
what licensing boards routinely do: impose right and unreasonable barriers to
newcomers who want to enter a business.
Last year, we reported on Taalib-Dan Uqdah, a Washington, DC hair-braider, who
was almost shut down because he posed a threat to other salons. John Stossel, a
reporter for ABC's "20/20," says his 20 years of consumer reporting have taught
him that licensing board "rules can end up hurting more people than they
protect."
Monique is one of the victims of those rules. She mainly wants to better
herself. One of her brothers has been in jail, and a sister has been expelled
from school. "I think owning your own business is a way of being free," she
says. "If more kids knew they could grow up to be their own boss they would be
more responsible and cause less trouble."
Perhaps Monique has technically violated Kansas's cosmetology statute. If so,
it's time it and the licensing laws in other states that regulate 500
occupations, covering 10% of the nation's work force, were overhauled. A
valuable program such as NFTE has enough trouble turning at-risk youth around
without having to battle petty bureaucrats at the same time.
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