In this episode of Unlicensed, we talk about the lawsuit the Mississippi Justice Institute filed against the Board of Cosmetology over licensing regulations for eyebrow threaders.

What is the state doing to prevent eyebrow threaders from working? And is this a widespread problem across industries in Mississippi?

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Mississippi has more than 2,600 hair braiders registered to practice their art with the state. And these numbers are only growing. They have more than doubled in the past six years.  

Our neighbors to the southwest, Louisiana, has only 19 people who hold the permit that is required to braid in the Pelican State. This, despite the fact, that Louisiana has a larger number of African Americans and a larger African immigrant population than Mississippi. 

Why is there such a discrepancy?

Louisiana requires hair braiders to receive an “alternative hair design” permit that includes at least 500 hours of classes. And only three schools in the entire state even offer curriculum for that license. 

But in Mississippi, Gov. Haley Barbour signed a law that freed the state’s African hair braiders from the irrelevant and unnecessary requirements of the Board of Cosmetology in 2005. Prior to that, hair braiders who wanted to teach others, such as Melony Armstrong, had to spend upwards of 3,200 hours in the classroom to learn cosmetology instructions that didn’t relate to hair braiding. 

After the Institute for Justice filed a lawsuit against the Board on behalf of Armstrong, along with Christina Griffin and Margaret Burden, two women who wished to learn hair braiding from Melony and become licensed, the Mississippi legislature responded by freeing hair braiders and exempting them from cosmetology regulations. 

And as we have seen, an economic boom has occurred within this profession. 

Now, hair braiders only have to pay a $25 registration fee and complete a “self-test” on infection control. And despite what proponents of licensing might offer, even with the repeal of most regulations, there were zero health and safety complaints filed against braiders in Mississippi between 2006 and 2012. 

The story of Melony Armstrong has been told many times in the fight for economic liberty, both in Mississippi and throughout the country - deservingly so. 

This isn’t much different than the lawsuit filed yesterday on behalf of Dipa Bhattarai, an eyebrow threader who is originally from Nepal, where threading is a way of life. Bhattarai was running two successful stores employing four people, while in college, until the state shut her down. 

Mississippi law requires eyebrow threaders to take 600 hours of classroom instruction, even though they won’t learn anything about threading in class. Rather, they will just spend thousands of dollars while not being allowed to work. 

The cases of Melony Armstrong and Dipa Bhattarai are classic examples of government overreach and licensing boards having the power to regulate – and limit – who can practice within their field. 

But as we saw with hair braiders, we can eliminate needless licensing barriers, put people back to work, and help improve the economy for everyone. 

The requirements to obtain an occupational license before working is a growing problem throughout the country. And Mississippi is certainly not immune to this current situation. 

Dipa Bhattarai knows the problems with the system all too well. She started a successful eyebrow threading business, only to have it shut down by the state. Mississippi law requires eyebrow threaders to obtain 600 hours of classroom instruction, to pay thousands of dollars, and to pass two exams.

Did I mention that nothing in those classes or on those exams covers eyebrow threading?

There once was a time when occupational licensing was reserved for those occupations that most would agree should be licensed. This includes medical professionals, lawyers, or teachers. But those days are long passed.  

Today, approximately 19 percent of Mississippians need a license to work. On average, licensing for low and middle-income occupations in Mississippi requires an individual to complete 155 days of training, to pass two exams, and to pay nearly $200 in fees. Those numbers will vary depending on the industry. For example, a shampooer must receive 1,500 clock hours of education. A fire alarm installer must pay over $1,000 in fees.

The net result is a decrease in the number of people who can work. A study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that occupational licensing reduces labor supply by 17 to 27 percent. In Mississippi, the Institute for Justice estimates that licensing has cost the state 13,000 jobs. All very real numbers.

What can we do?

Mississippi has made progress. In 2017, the state adopted an occupational licensing review board to provide direct supervision over occupational licensing laws moving forward. The state has also made it easier for ex-offenders to receive licenses so they can obtain employment and restricted licensing boards from pulling the license of someone who defaults on their student loans. 

All good steps, but they don’t address the underlying problems with occupational licensing. Earlier this year, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey signed a law that provides reciprocity for all licenses, even though those states don’t do the same for Arizona licenses. A couple other states have since followed suit. And this proposal has won the praise of a Democrat running for president, Andrew Yang. He called the current limits on reciprocity bad for those seeking new opportunities. A Democratic candidate for president praising a Republican governor. It can happen. 

Because this is common sense. Imagine if we needed a different driver’s license every time we crossed state lines. An individual doesn’t forget their craft because they move. Mississippi does have limited reciprocity for military families, but generally speaking the state hasn’t been open to the idea.

A bill that was introduced last session would’ve given out-of-state medical practitioners the right to practice in the state for charitable reasons. It didn’t make it out of committee. We can only speculate as to who is opposed to allowing out-of-state medical professionals to provide charity care in the poorest state in the nation. 

At a time when few states offer reciprocity, it could be a great selling feature for Mississippi. 

But despite bi-partisan support for reform, we also have entrenched opposition. Which is what licensing creates. The state of Utah recently bragged about nabbing unlicensed contractors. New Jersey was able to rid the streets of 29 unlicensed movers. 

It is true that licensing leads to higher wages for those with a license, but it does so by driving up costs for the consumer. A Heritage Foundation report found that Mississippians pay an $800 hidden tax each year because of licensing. And we do this even though there isn’t a clear increase in the quality of service. Rather, it just distorts the free market. Which is why licensing boards are so determined to protect their monopoly. 

Instead, we should trust consumers to make decisions for themselves, not the government or an industry lobbyist. We can do this through market competition, third-party ratings systems, such as an app like Yelp or even Facebook, or through private certifications that allow both the entrepreneur and the customer to decide if that certification is important.  

Because if we really want more jobs and a smaller government footprint, it starts by creating an environment that encourages work; not one that encourages the creation of hurdles and obstacles.

This column appeared in the Mississippi Business Journal on August 8, 2019.

Dipa Bhattarai was an entrepreneur just trying to pursue the American dream. Then the state shut her down.

Bhattarai grew up in Nepal, where threading is a way of life, and learned how to thread at a young age from her family. She came to Mississippi after receiving a scholarship to attend Mississippi University for Women, where she saw an opening in the market for eyebrow threading. 

”My friends loved it when I threaded their eyebrows for them, and kept telling me I should open a business,” said Bhattarai, who is now a graduate student at the University of Mississippi. “I knew it was a great opportunity to bring together my passion for threading and my dream of owning a business.”  

It was. Before long, Bhattarai had her own stores in Columbus and Starkville.

Until the state shut her down.

As a new school year approaches for children, some 15,000-20,000 Mississippians won’t be settling into a traditional public or private school classroom.

Rather, they will be classified as homeschoolers, though that definition ranges from those who are part of co-ops to those who take classes online to those who follow standard curriculum at home to those who take a more unschooled approach. Or maybe it’s a little of all that and more. 

While the numbers are just estimates without a formal registration process, we have seen homeschooling jump quite significantly – both in Mississippi and nationwide. According to federal data, the number of homeschoolers more than doubled over the first decade over the 21st century.

And there is no reason to believe those numbers are doing anything but growing.  

After all, it’s easier than ever to homeschool, and to be as engaged (or not) as you would like. Thanks to the power of the Internet, and social media in general, a group of moms (or dads) can easily organize a trip, whether it’s to a museum, zoo, water park, etc., as a group without any formal organization. It’s easier than ever to meet with other homeschool families, to share ideas, or to exchange books and curriculum. Or to just get encouragement from local families.

Reasons families give for homeschooling

Source: National Center for Education Statistics

And Mississippi makes it easy to homeschool, as they should. Families just have to file an annual certificate of enrollment with your local attendance officer by September 15. Beyond that, there are no regulations concerning curriculum or testing, nor do you need to provide any additional information to the local school district. 

Still, that hasn’t stopped school districts in Mississippi from trying. 

Last year, Greenville Public School District Deputy Superintendent Glenn Dedeaux said the district is “legally responsible to ensure every child of educating age receives an adequate education” and he warned that not all homeschool curricula “are approved by the Mississippi Department of Education to meet the necessary standards.” Dedeaux also implied that homeschoolers must take subject matter tests to graduate. Not true. 

We also have the story of a Mississippi mom who was arrested on truancy charges. Her child had previously been enrolled in public school, but she chose to homeschool him because of health reasons. She decided to begin homeschooling the following year, but was arrested before the September 15 deadline to file her notice to homeschool. 

And school districts in general have taken it upon themselves to require more than a notice to homeschool at time. The Natchez-Adams School District tried to demand homeschoolers provide receipts for curriculum purchases. They likely aren’t the only district who has asked for information parents aren’t required to provide.

Our guess is as homeschooling continues to grow in popularity, we will continue to see school districts overstep their authority. And the state might be interested in enacting new regulations as well. 

We can hope they won’t. 

In this edition of Unlicensed, the MCPP team talks about how we can improve the state's economy.

We have heard a lot of talk in political circles about an Amazon report that many believed showed Mississippi as being the fastest growing state for small and mid-sized business. It sounds great, but this has been grossly exaggerated.

While we are making some gains in business climate rankings, we continue to lag behind our neighbors in the Southeast and most of our competitors in the nation in many categories. There is some encouraging news, but we should not deceive ourselves about the work we have left to do. What does that work look like?

Government regulators have found their newest target: dogs. Specifically, restaurants that allow dogs on their premise, usually on a courtyard, patio, or some other outdoor area.

After the Clarion Ledger ran a story on pet-friendly restaurants in the Jackson metro area, the Mississippi Department of Health fired back saying that is illegal. And that Mississippi code prohibits pets in restaurants, even outdoor areas.

MDH cites the Food and Drug Administration's Food Code model, which is housed in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, for the prohibition. That model recommends prohibiting animals in food service establishments, save for service dogs. 

The state doesn't have to follow the FDA model. Indeed, many states have already legalized dogs in restaurants. 

While it may be somewhat tricky to find a formal statistic, there are at least 12 states that explicitly allow dogs to join their owners in restaurants, according to the Animal Legal & Historical Center at Michigan State University. This started with Florida in 2006, and now includes California, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Tennessee.

These laws generally do two things. They often allow local governments to enact ordinances if they would like and they allow restaurants to choose whether they would like to welcome dogs on their property. 

And with that, consumers can choose to bring their dog to a pet-friendly establishment, just as those who don’t like dogs can opt to go somewhere else. And the owner of the restaurant can decide what is better for his or her business. 

What path a restaurant chooses isn’t as important as the restaurant having the ability to choose. But prohibiting dogs in restaurants are just one of the more than 117,000 restrictions in the state’s regulatory code.  

The biggest regulator in the state? As you would imagine, the same Department of Health that is going after dogs in restaurants. 

And why does this matter?

Regulatory growth has a detrimental effect on economic growth. We now have a history of empirical data on the relationship between regulations and economic growth. A 2013 study in the Journal of Economic Growth estimates that federal regulations have slowed the U.S. growth rate by 2 percentage points a year, going back to 1949. A recent study by the Mercatus Center estimates that federal regulations have slowed growth by 0.8 percent since 1980. If we had imposed a cap on regulations in 1980, the economy would be $4 trillion larger, or about $13,000 per person. Real numbers, and real money, indeed. 

On the international side, researchers at the World Bank have estimated that countries with a lighter regulatory touch grow 2.3 percentage points faster than countries with the most burdensome regulations. And yet another study, this published by the Quarterly Journal of Economics, found that heavy regulation leads to more corruption, larger unofficial economies, and less competition, with no improvement in public or private goods. 

A prescription for lowering the regulatory burden on a state is the one-in-two-out rule, or a regulatory cap. In 2017, one of President Donald Trump’s first executive orders was to require at least two prior regulations to be identified for elimination for every new regulation issued. This is badly needed. We have gone from 400,000 federal regulations in 1970 to over 1.1 million today. 

Many years ago, British Columbia took on a similar mission. And in less than two decades, their regulatory requirements have decreased by 48 percent. The result has been an economic revival for the Canadian province. 

Whether it’s a sunset provision, where regulations expire and must be reauthorized after a period of time, or one-in-two-out policy, Mississippi should move in the direction toward a smaller regulatory state with more freedom. And if a regulation is truly important to our well-being, let the regulators prove why.

A decision by the state to allow dogs in restaurants won’t change the trajectory of the state’s economy, for better or worse. But a deep dive into the unnecessary and outdated regulations of each agency can go a very long way toward removing unnecessary barriers and inhibitors. 

One of the most important goals we have for Mississippi is to get our small and mid-sized businesses growing more rapidly.

We want to see a day in the not too distant future when our state’s economy is driven more by private sector actions than by the public sector ones. That will require a lot of changes, including reducing the heavy role governments, and government officials and politicians, play in our economy. It will require less restrictions, fewer regulations, a reduction in licensing regimes, the elimination of protectionism, a commitment to robust competition, and a devaluing of the favor-seeking component of business in the Magnolia State.

The hallmark of a strong and durable economy is a high level of competition, a high number of start-ups, and acknowledgement that pursuing customer delight is more valuable than pursuing legislative support.

An integral part of the motivation to change any person, policy, or action is first to recognize a problem exists in the first place. That requires honesty. It also requires humility. Only after the recognition can we actually commit to making the changes required. Once we make the commitment, then all that remains is the courage to change. Mississippi has no shortage of courage, so I’m very confident in the ability of the free market and capitalism to help us drive small and mid-sized business growth.

Nothing can produce long-term economic growth like a commitment to unfettered capitalism – the kind that has produced thousands of examples of unplanned, unpredicted, and unprecedented private sector success. 

However, we are not always honest about our current situation. Too often our elected officials and government employees expend much effort claiming success, cheerleading isolated reports, and denying systemic problems.

A ribbon-cutting or a groundbreaking announcement doesn’t indicate success, unless you work in the Department of Economic Development, it indicates a partnership whereby government has agreed to invest a portion of taxpayer money to a particular company in a particular industry. I’m happy when we convince companies to move to Mississippi or to build a facility here, but I’d rather see us celebrating the unprecedented growth of companies that were born here and managed to grow here without asking the taxpayers for assistance. We can do both, and we should do more of the latter.

A good example of our leaders’ penchant for hyperbolic celebration of economic news is the creative way an Amazon-produced, small business report has been turned into something it is not. If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a thousand times from politicians, business leaders, and media members, “Amazon, the world’s largest company, just ranked Mississippi as the fastest growing state for small and mid-sized business.” That is simply not true.

What Amazon actually did was produce a report focused on its own small and mid-sized business partners in the U.S. (SMBs) that sell products directly through Amazon’s stores. Of the SMBs selling within Amazon’s digital platform, Mississippi was ranked first of the 10 fastest growing states.

While that is certainly good news, it has been grossly exaggerated and used to suggest Mississippi is one of the fastest growing states for small and mid-sized businesses. The data does not support such a statement. 

While we are making some gains in business climate rankings, we continue to lag behind our neighbors in the Southeast and most of our competitors in the nation in many categories. There is some encouraging news but we should not deceive ourselves about the work we have left to do.

Here is a sampling of the most recent business-related rankings.

From a public policy standpoint, I could make a very strong case, as did Milton Friedman and William F. Buckley, that our decades-long war on drugs has been a failure.

No different than our previous government prohibitions, major criminal enterprises are the big winners. In essence, our government drives up illegal drug values by interfering with the market in the name of protecting people from their own choices. The benefactors are often the largest cartels who benefit from the lack of competition that results from our actions. Prohibitions on legal alcohol sales, for example, did not reduce the supply of alcohol. It was just as readily available in times of prohibition.

The difference was that bootleggers and speakeasies, essentially criminal entrepreneurs, did the supplying and U.S. consumers were made into criminals by seeking a drink. The same economic law applies to drugs.

I am not, however, trying to make the case for the legalization of recreational marijuana. Instead, I am using the prohibition example to demonstrate the absurdity of opposing the legalization of medical marijuana.

The gubernatorial debate on Tuesday night revealed the unanimous policy viewpoints of the three Republican candidates. To my surprise, each candidate clearly opposed the legalization of medical marijuana. They did so for various reasons, none of which I thought were compelling. For candidates who should be in favor of limited government, liberty, and personal responsibility, the responses were perplexing.

One opposing argument was essentially that Mississippi has no right to make legal the use of medical marijuana and must defer to the federal government on the classification of drugs. In fact, the federal government has no legal authority to prevent states from changing their laws to remove state-level penalties for medical marijuana use and we have at least 34 examples of this.

There was, of course, the claim that using medical marijuana will be a “gateway” to other drugs. Medical marijuana is not the same as recreational marijuana and trying to conflate the two is an insult to the citizens of Mississippi and comes at the expense of patients who should be free to choose a legal option to opiate-based painkillers, with the guidance of their doctor.

Rather than trying to turn this issue into a “law and order” one and attempting to convince us that patients suffering from debilitating illnesses and the doctors caring for them are either criminals or fledgling addicts, our politicians should focus on removing this unnecessary barrier and letting people make choices about their own health care.

The gubernatorial responses also indicated a lack of knowledge about how their fellow Americans and Mississippians feel about the issue. Recent polling demonstrates that citizens are ahead of politicians and legislators across the county on this issue, with anywhere from as low as 65% to as high as 94% of Americans supporting the legalization of medical marijuana. In Mississippi, 77% of voters support it, including 75% of Republicans. It spans all ages, races, and party affiliations. It even includes 69% of frequent churchgoers. 

A vast majority of Americans recognize the legitimate medical benefits of marijuana, as well as a large number of medical organizations. It is less harmful and poses fewer negative side effects than most prescription drugs – especially opiate-based painkillers – and patients often find it to be a more effective treatment.

Licensed medical doctors, already heavily regulated by the state, should be allowed to prescribe solutions to deal with debilitating medical conditions, no matter the derivative of such solutions. If marijuana can provide relief to those suffering from terrible illnesses like cancer and HIV/AIDS, it is unconscionable to prevent it, much less to criminalize patients for using it. People who would benefit from medical marijuana should have right to use it legally. As I outlined in the opening paragraph, legal prohibitions on commonly accepted behavior has never produced positive results. It is simply bad public policy.

Government is already regulating the health care industry at an unprecedented level. The federal government has grown into an unwieldy and unresponsive beast – increasing its paternalism over us all.

I believe Mississippi should join the other states who value federalism and respect the rights of patients and licensed doctors to decide what is best. Based on the progress thus far, I think it is highly likely the 2020 referendum on medical marijuana will pass.

For liberty-minded conservatives, this is an easy decision. It should have been the same for the gubernatorial candidates.