The Institute for Justice is continuing its legal fight against absurd and anticompetitive occupational licensing requirements in Texas. The Institute is representing eight Texan eyebrow threaders being forced to pay $20,000 for up to 1,500 hours of training in beauty schools which do not even teach threading.
While I think the best way to fight stupid licensing requirements is to ignore the state and turn to the gray market, this sort of legal work is important to protect those being actively bullied by the State. Forcing one branch of government to find another in the wrong is never an easy task, of course, and it’s amazing the IJ has had any success at all. Well done, chaps!
Brad Taylor is a graduate student in Political Science at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. He blogs at 
There is clearly a role for taking the state to task for being absurd. The ACLU used to do that until they abandoned having chapters in every community and went to this new centralised scheme. The work of IJ and FIRE and others in asking the state to look at what the state is doing is good stuff, but it reeks of reform and gradualism.
Meanwhile people are dying, people are starving, people are suffering. I don’t want to reform the war machine, I want to abandon it. I don’t want to fix the worst abuses of the system, I want to obviate all of the system. I really don’t want to be one of those cases that doesn’t merit the special attention of IJ or ACLU or Bill of Rights defense committee or whatever group, because it was a bad abuse, but not one of the worst abuses.
On the whole, if we are going to do something effective and immediate, agorism is the path forward. What you call the grey market or what others call the black market, as long as it is part of the golden economy is all good. (I disparage and rebuke the red markets where coercion is involved.)
It would be better if 100,000 people abandoned the system and had nothing to do with it than if one person won a single court case against the system.
It would be better if 100,000 people abandoned the system and had nothing to do with it than if one person won a single court case against the system.
Absolutely. And thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of people are already doing cosmetology stuff out of their homes. Scratching by… Good for them.