Texas Supreme Court strikes blow for liberty

"Consider the work of God;
For who can make straight what He has made crooked?"
Ecclesiastes 7:13

Unlike the Feds, at least the Texas Supreme Court understands a thing or two about economic liberty:

So it’s not the U.S. Supreme Court throwing wrenches into the state’s new abortion restrictions or affirmative action programs or same-sex marriage prohibitions. But in all the excitement over the recent flurry of high-profile high court opinions, readers may have missed the Texas Supreme Court’s hair-raising decision last week that the rules governing occupational licensing have to, well, actually make sense.

The long-running dispute between eyebrow threaders — they run tightened thread loops along the surface of the skin to pluck eyebrows — and state regulators began in 2008, when the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation officially declared threading a cosmetology procedure. That meant the profession, which is commonly practiced by East Asians, was subject to the same regulations that applied to hair stylists.

Those rules require lengthy and expensive education. Cosmetologists typically pay between $9,000 and $20,000 for 750 hours of training over 9 months in everything from basic sanitation to facial treatments, color psychology, anatomy, aroma therapy, and so on.

Yet, the threaders noted in their legal filings, nothing in the state-licensed cosmetology curriculum says anything about eyebrow threading. As a result, only a tiny handful of schools offer the training. And the subject appears nowhere on the state cosmetology exam every student must pass before becoming licensed.

....

In its June 26 decision, the justices voted 6-3 in favor of the threaders. Although the court considered several technical legal questions, at heart they agreed that Texas regulators had placed an irrational burden on eyebrow threaders by requiring them to complete an expensive and time-consuming cosmetology education that doesn’t even teach them their regulated skill.

Read the whole thing here.