"I'm From the Government and I'm Here to Help... Screw the Poors"

A Rant in Several Parts

[I originally wrote this almost 10 years ago, but it still holds up with a little clean-up.]

There are undoubtedly people who would like to cut hair - and make a little extra money for themselves and their families - but who can’t because in this country, you need a license from the government to cut someone’s hair. This is not a bad joke. In fact, Doug Stanhope has a great routine on this exact subject that is worth watching.

Think about it for a second. You need permission from the United States Government, or one of its several states, in order to cut. someone’s. hair. The immediate question is, from what exactly is the populace being protected - the consequences of... a really bad haircut? So, maybe a bad hair week - or a few weeks - at worst? Nevertheless, you have to pay money to a state ‘certified’ barber or cosmetology school (which, in turn, had to pay the government in order to become state certified schools and teach only the ‘correct’ information and techniques) in order to get a license from the state to actually begin cutting hair for recompense. For the record, I began cutting hair in college when I was in Navy ROTC. I bought a pair of clippers and began to learn how to cut my own, at first, then some timid friends volunteered, and by the time I was a senior in college I was probably giving 15-20 haircuts a week at my apartment. I didn’t charge anyone, largely because we were all broke college students, but the skill was useful in ensuring that all of us had fresh haircuts for inspections.

Now, here is where it gets absurd, corrupt, and horrible for everyone: typically, the state boards that are set up to regulate a given field are made up of whom…? Why, members of the industry, of course. This is only mete and natural because what in the flying f$%& does some bureaucrat or politician know about cutting hair? “Nothing” is the correct answer here. So, inevitably, some ‘industry leaders’ have to be ‘deputized’ - that is, brought on to some government board to decide what schools should and can teach in order to be considered “safe” to instruct barbers in the incredibly important, complicated, difficult, unknowable hygiene aspects of cutting hair, which so far as I can tell in all of my years of getting and giving haircuts, consists of cleaning the blades of the scissors and the clippers, usually with a disinfectant spray or a jar into which one drops the implements and, Ta-DAH!! You’re good.

Now, these deputized experts, do you think they come from smaller, upstart businesses who might be developing new techniques as new styles or technology comes along, or do you think they might be in a more traditional, well-established business? The correct answer is always “older, larger, entrenched” business. Which results in what…? Less innovation, less consumer choice, more barriers to entry, which always - ALWAYS - hurts the poor. Always. Both coming and going. The consumer looking for a competitive priced, quality haircut, or maybe even something new, like traditional African hair-braiding, for example - gets screwed. And the small, relatively poor person looking to lift themselves up by practicing a much-needed and always necessary trade? They can’t do so because the regulators - in some cases competitors - say “Nope.” (Unless one gets lucky and the Institute for Justice takes up their cause, which, God Bless those people, they do on a regular basis).

Just Fake a Public Crisis and Voilà!

The depressing fact is that all it takes is some asshole - yes, I use that word - to invent a public safety threat. It doesn’t even need to be real. And the more you dig in on governmental regulation, the more you will find either entrenched industry or a government busybody seeking out some new occupation, activity, or trade to regulate with half-imagined justifications for why it should be regulated. Lest this seem like hyperventilating nonsense, take a case that the Institute for Justice won back in 2015.

Savannah had a law regulating tour guides. Yep, you read that right. It was against the law to give people tours and tell them about Savannah without a f&^%ing license from the government. My favorite part about the repeal of that law by the “town fathers” is the line where Councilman Van Johnson stated that he was ‘disappointed’ by the proposal to repeal the licensing law but that “I also realize that when you come up against the U.S. Constitution, you lose.”

What a revelation by an elected official! Please help me in giving Councilman Van Johnson the 2015 “You're the Begrudging Statist Asshole of the Year” award! I mean, he’s disappointed that he can’t regulate people who want to give others a tour of Savannah for a few piasters and perhaps make a living, earn a few extra bucks. B-b-but what if someone gave people tours and...and...and...gave them wrong information?!? Oh. My. Holy. God. People might think something historically inaccurate about Savannah!?!

This is always where the complete idiocy of these regulations becomes manifest: the moment you actually consider what the harm is that the regs are supposed to prevent. I have this vision of some homeless guy, half-baked or half-insane, taking people around in a bike-carriage, muttering obscenities about different houses, making up facts about different political figures, calling people slave-owners who worked for abolition, you name it. Do we really need laws to prohibit this? As if it wouldn’t be self-regulating.

I think what secretly burns in the heart of every statist bureaucrat is the fear that people might actually like that. Hell, I for one would pay handsomely for the homeless guy to completely make shit up while explaining what a turd Councilman Johnson is. I’d pay extra if he was funny and really creative. I suspect a lot of people would - and the guy might actually make a living. “John Farnsworth’s Fake Savannah Historical Tours: Come learn all the best Fake Low Country History That Wasn’t!”

The alternative, the one people don’t like to consider, is that it’s simply corruption.

Let me provide another example from an IJ case: teeth whitening. In another (now semi-famous) case, the North Carolina Dental Examiners Board sought to make teeth-whitening services by non-dentists illegal. In fact, they did so - but not because there was any claim anyone was harmed, or because there is any special dental technique that must be mastered in teeth-whitening (there isn’t), but rather to protect the dentists’ monopoly on those services, and thus their ability to charge significantly higher rates for what amounts to something you could do in your home for $19.99 if you were willing to shine a UV light into your own mouth.

The Federal Trade Commission (for a change) took the side of consumers and found the Dentists to be in violation of antitrust laws. The case eventually made its way to the Supreme Court. And, for a change, the Supreme Court ruled in a way that would serve consumers and favor more economic liberty (although if you read the decision, it’s more about siding with the FTC and ensuring that sovereign immunity - one of the worst Supreme Court created doctrines of all time - is intact, much more than it is some bellwether of a Supreme Court returning to its original charter to protect the rights of the citizenry against abuses by the other two branches of government).

George Will wrote a brilliant and telling column about the legal and commercial history of these kinds of cartels - and how they got to be so in the first place. It is under this guise that Progressives and the political left constantly demonize “capitalism” and claim that we need government regulation to prevent those greedy profit-seeking companies from working their sinister wiles on the poor unsuspecting schlubs known as the American electorate. Nothing in any of these case or actions is even a distant relative of capitalism, of course. The temptation to use economic regulatory powers for their own benefits is simply too much for politicians - and I lump regulators and bureaucrats in with that lot.

That revolving door works both ways, too. I got a firsthand look at just how corrupt and evil the FDA is - yes, the Food and Drug Administration - when I was defending servicemembers for refusing the mandatory anthrax vaccination - an order which was ultimately found in federal court to be illegal. I know because I worked behind the scenes on the case. I also had access to internal emails that showed the FDA collaborating right along with the Department of Defense to get that program back up and running as soon as possible. In the subsequent years, the military has refused to correct a single record of anyone who was court-martialed for refusing to take the shots. I know because I handled several of those cases, too. In the midst of all of that, I was amazed - and shocked - to learn how often FDA regulators would leave their government regulator job only to walk into a lucrative job the next day at some company that was subject to FDA regulation - and then they would be talking to their former colleagues, who would be inspecting these same companies. It’s as incestuous and dirty as you can imagine.

The same thing happens at the Department of Defense, as well. I had one friend, a pretty conservative fellow before his tour at the Pentagon, who retired in disgust after three years of working in weapons procurement. He once jokingly told me over lunch: “You know we’ve spent six billion dollars - SIX BILLION DOLLARS! And not a single rivet has been popped. Feasibility studies, surveys, powerpoint presentations...yeah, we’ve got plenty of those!” He just stared at me over his plate. We were actually eating in the Pentagon, so he leaned forward. “With SIX BILLION DOLLARS, me, you, and a couple of friends could have built one of these fucking things, broken it, figured out why it broke, built another, fixed that one, and we’d already be on the Mark Four model - with three billion to fucking spare.”

I didn’t see him for a while and then I caught up with him after his retirement. I thought he would be staying in the DC area, but he moved as far away as he could. “Oh, I got offered the Beltway bandit job, alright. Contractors wanted to hire me for my ‘access’ or I could have come right back into my old job as a contractor at double what I made as an O-5. Fuck this place. I quit.”

I told someone recently that it wasn’t that I wanted to find corruption, incompetence, and cronyism as a matter of either disposition or desire: I’m an optimist by nature like believing the best about people. It’s just that I only find it every time I look closely enough at something, especially if it involves government regulation. I like average, working stiffs, probably mostly because none of them are ever close enough to power to wield it against their neighbors, but if Homeowners Associations are any indication, you give anyone the opportunity to wield power over their neighbors and they'll do it...Man, will they do it. Lord Acton was not wrong.

In the realm of regulation, as the Institute for Justice points out, it is crippling our economy.

In addition, states interested in eliminating unnecessary licensing requirements should look for guidance to the laws of other states. While some occupations are licensed in all (or nearly all) states, many others are licensed only in a handful—with no apparent ill effects. A study of 102 low- and middle-income occupations subject to licensing requirements found that only 15 were licensed in 40 states or more. On average, the 102 occupations studied were licensed in just 22 states. Where even one state does not regulate an occupation, other states should seriously consider whether licensing that occupation is truly necessary.

The Institute for Justice, in License to Work, identified 92 occupations licensed by less than 50 states. Every one of these is a candidate to eliminate licensing[.]

The article then lists all 92. Some are mind-boggling. Some are funny. All are tragic because they erect barriers to entry that always and everywhere hurts someone for whom the barrier to entry is simply too high to be surmounted. That burden is never too high for someone who is rich; always, always, always do these barriers hurt the poor.

The Living Minimum Wage Scam

The same is true for the minimum wage, but I’ll save that for the next part in this series and leave it just to piss people off... Yes, minimum wage laws always hurt the poor eventually, because you can’t artificially make the value of a dishwasher, or a burger-flipper, suddenly turn from six-dollars an hour to fifteen. Anyone who thinks they can has never owned a small business, nor do they understand that labor is a commodity, just like tomatoes or silver. Okay screw it, I’m already started, so I’ll go off on minimum wage while I’m at it.

Labor has a market value and government fiat can’t magically make it fifteen dollars if it already has a market price of seven. Here is one form of proof of my claim: guess who filed for the first exemption from Los Angeles’ new citywide $15 minimum wage law, before it was even passed? The City of Los Angeles’ union, of course. The very same people who agitated for that exact f%^ing law. Now, that’s not proof precisely, but it isn’t just ironic that the people advocating for a “living wage” for the entire city’s workforce - the Union - don’t want THEIR employees to have that same “living wage.” Hmmmm....I wonder why that is...?? Actually, I don’t wonder, because I already know the answer. It’s because THE UNION can’t afford to pay their low-level interns and other temps that kind of money and still stay afloat, but they sure as shit want to impose it on other small businesses. Always, “laws for thee, but not for me.” Yet a large part of the public continues to believe this shit.

Let me try spelling it out in a different way. I love just tooling around the small business administration’s website every now and again. The information available there, for anyone who knows where and for what to search, is a treasure trove. For example, according to the 2011 data, there are a total of 5,684,424 “firms” - that is, businesses, in the United States. Of those 5.68 million firms, how many would you guess are “big” businesses? Let’s define “big” as a business with more than 500 employees. The answer is less than 18,000. 17,671, to be precise.

So, whenever people have this discussion about minimum wage the first (and always stupidest) words out of their mouth are all about how the corporate bigwigs are getting all of this money, and how can they justify paying their CEO that much, and they should pay more to the workers, on and on into inanity. Why do I ridicule those points? For the exact same reason I ridiculed the regulators and politicians cries for more regulation. It’s always the exceptions that are used to justify a rule that winds up being disproportionately borne by those lower down the economic ladder. Let me point out the statistic again because if you’re angry about my criticism you’ll have already forgotten the numbers: 5,666,753 businesses out of the 5,684,424 total businesses in the United States have less than 500 employees. That is to say, 99.689133% of all businesses in the U.S. are NOT “big” businesses and have no CEO making mega-money.

Okay, you say, let’s re-define “big” to actually be much smaller, say less than 100 employees. Now “only” 98.26% of businesses are NOT big. In other words, cutting extravagant CEO pay to better pay workers is only a possibility in 1.74% of U.S. businesses, the ones that have more¹ than 100 employees. So, let’s pass a policy that will hurt 98.26% of US businesses because you’re angry and envious of the 1.74% and the CEO who makes bank to run some giant mega-concern. Nice move, A-hole. It’s like those teachers in middle school who give the whole class detention because they heard someone talking but they’re not certain who it was, so the whole class gets screwed. Collective punishment, regardless of wrong. Wonderful idea. And so morally defensible.

Let me conclude my argument with something I know well: washing dishes in a small restaurant. I made six bucks an hour washing dishes when I was in high school and over a summer or two in college. Even now that seems about right to me. Maybe costs of living might shade it up a little in some places, but the bottom line is washing dishes is low-skill labor. It basically requires someone to run the machine constantly, ensure the dishes are clean, clear the dirty ones, stack the clean ones, and keep the line moving, especially on busy nights.

The margins in running restaurants are extraordinarily tight. Most restaurants - certainly greater than 60% - fail within five years of opening. If the dishwashing job is artificially and suddenly forced by government diktat to go from $6/hr. to $15/hour, that extra $9 per hour is a significant increase in labor costs for the business owner. The market didn’t demand that; the customers didn’t demand it, nor indicate a desire for increased prices on the menu. This is the equivalent of giving 9 people on staff a dollar per hour increase in wages. More importantly, I’m positing only one dishwasher was affected by the artificial increase in costs, but the reality is it would likely apply to multiple employees doing low-skill labor that helps make a restaurant run. (The kid who’s prepping by shucking green beans, or bringing bags of flower up from the cellar, or taking out the garbage, etc.) Meaning the problem isn’t simply one person getting a $9 per hour increase - it likely is multiples of that.

The ONLY way a small business can solve that problem is to cut that job. Wait, you say, they can’t just cut dishwashing out. They have to have clean dishes! I said they cut the job, not the need for the service, and the $9 per hour increased cost. Instead, the restaurant owner offers to pay other people already on staff a couple of more dollars and hour to pick up that work, likely to hold the costs where they were before: about $6 per hour. THAT is the economic reality of increasing minimum wage. Some poor schlub who was making $6 an hour is now out of a job because that job no longer exists, even if the service is still required. Artificial minimum wage raises always, ALWAYS hurt poor people by eliminating low-wage, low-skill labor, which is exactly what the people who are poor need: low-skill work to begin to ascend the economic ladder. It’s like trying to build credit. You don’t start out with an AmEx Platinum card, and you can’t force low-skill work to be paid commensurate with work that’s worth more - at least not without hurting poor people.

But Progressives, union shills, and politicians, (but I repeat myself) cater to the economically ignorant - which unfortunately includes a ton of Americans educated in a near-socialist propaganda machine - (yes, I put four children through public and private schools, all over the country and world, I have a basis for saying that) - and continue to perpetuate this kind of stupidity that “everyone deserves a living wage.” A wonderful sound bite that is both (a) completely false, and (b) contains the moral underpinnings of socialism (quelle surprise!). No one is entitled to anything from someone else. You’re entitled to no more than the value of your labor in the marketplace for that work. If you think you’re underpaid, then you should be able to find similar work at another firm paying you more. If not, then you’re talking shit.

And while we’re talking about wage & other scams…

The constant harping about the supposed “gender wage gap” is another demonstrably false piece of public pablum. You want proof? Obama rode that BS right to the White House. Then it was pointed out that the Obama White House...had the very same “gender pay gap.” And Obama’s White House offered the exact same defense that every member of the Chamber of Commerce has been offering since this nonsense started. The fact is, as the comment below the piece notes, there is no gender wage gap. None - not if we’re actually comparing apples to apples. The only man to be elected to the National Organization for Women’s NY Board of directors - three times - wrote a book debunking this myth years ago. And, of course, spouting such heresy got him promptly tossed from NOW - because if, as Farrell demonstrates in his book, it turns out that women are actually paid more than their male counterparts in identical jobs with identical experience - especially if they are in their thirties - then NOW really doesn’t have much to campaign for, do they?

One can find this same kind of hypocrisy and corruption in even the most needed of causes. Does anyone really think Al Sharpton gives a flying shit about the plight of blacks or how to improve the conditions for blacks as a whole? Just imagine if it turns out that every police encounter that goes wrong with a black male ISN’T a result of discrimination - then what is the Reverend Al going to have to do? Get a fucking job, like the rest of us. Given his own well-documented history of racist slurs against Jews, or his part in the phony Tawanna Brawley race-hoax, I find it hard to take him seriously that he really cares about racism. Racists don’t care about racism, other than perpetuating it. In that sense, I find him perfectly consistent.

Which returns me to the beginning of this and the cries of “public safety” and the need for government intervention in just about anything. I mean, post Covid-19, have we not finally learned our lesson??

1. That’s an editorial fix from the original, which erroneously had “less” in there.