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Let Freedom Gel

Wednesday, November 13th, 2002

Reader Brian Hipp sends along an amusing anectdote. First, a note about Brian, or “Hipp” as he’s affectionately referred to by our one mutual friend: I was at a wedding last October where “Hipp” was the best man. I bring this up because “Hipp” delivered the second best best-man speech I’ve ever heard (I’ll share the best one with you at another time). It began, eloquently, thusly: “Hoey (the nickname of the groom) is pretty much a bastard.”

It was all gravy from there. By the end, it was time for the priest to give thanks before dinner. The priest began by saying, “After that speech, I think we could all use a moment in prayer.”

Anyway, here’s Brian’s email:

I like to think that our country will eventually become libertarian, but an episode yesterday at my local Supercuts convinced me otherwise.

In the middle of my haircut, I asked the hairdresser what all she had to do to get her cosmetology license. She said she had to take a bunch of classes, take a written test and perform various hair styling techniques on a manequin. The written test mostly covered sanitation regulations and similar stuff. Then she said she used to live in Missouri, and she had to go through the entire licensing process again when she moved to Kansas. She said that they have to pay $45 or something every couple years to renew the license. Thatâs when I started in with the libertarian questions.

âDonât you resent that you had to take several tests administered by the State in order to be a hairdresser?â

âSort of.â

âDoesnât it make you mad that our taxes support the State Cosmetology board?â

âWell, I never thought of that. I guess so.â

âDonât you think itâs a little silly for the state to even have a cosmetology board? What are they doing, protecting the public from bad haircuts?â

This is when the hairdresser turned to the dark side.

âOh no. We have to have it. If they didnât enforce all these rules, all the beauty shops and barbershops would be gross, with trash everywhere and stuff.â

âBut if you went into a beauty shop and it was gross, you would just find another beautyshop. Why do we need the state enforcing all kinds of hairdresser guidelines?â

âBecause if they didnât, all the beautyshops would be gross and no one would go to them.â

âI know, but certainly you would find some good beauty shops, you would go there, and pretty soon the gross ones would go out of business. Plus, you wouldnât have to pay the state to get a license and you wouldnât have to take a bunch of state-certified classes to be a hairdresser.â

âBut then people wouldnât know how to cut hair the right way, and people wouldnât be able to get good haircuts or anything.

âBut again, if you went to a hairdresser and got a bad haircut or she couldnât dye your hair very well, wouldnât you just go to another hairdresser who could do a better job? You surely could have learned how to do all that stuff without the state watching to make sure you could put in highlights or whatever.â

At this point, she started getting agitated and I stopped talking about all this. It just seems so basic that market forces, unabated by the omniscient Kansas State Board of Cosmetology, would lead to good hair styling businesses. This sort of thing, state involvment at the micro level, sometimes makes me even more mad than government involvement at the macro level.

I couldn’t agree more. I’ve never tried to turn a hair stylist before. But I’m pretty sure ever cabby in D.C. has by now heard my spiel on libertarianism, or at least some drunken, slurred, bastardization of it.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 13th, 2002 at 5:46 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.