"In August 2010, for example, a team of heavily armed Orange County, Florida, sheriff’s deputies raided several black- and Hispanic-owned barbershops in the Orlando area. More raids followed in September and October. The Orlando Sentinel reported that police held barbers and customers at gunpoint and put some in handcuffs, while they turned the shops inside out. The police raided a total of nine shops and arrested thirty-seven people. By all appearances, these raids were drug sweeps. Shop owners told the Sentinel that police asked them where they were hiding illegal drugs and weapons. But in the end, thirty-four of the thirty-seven arrests were for “barbering without a license,” a misdemeanor for which only three people have ever served jail time in Florida. The most disturbing aspect of the Orlando raids was that police didn’t even attempt to obtain a legal search warrant. They didn’t need to, because they conducted the raids in conjunction with the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation. Despite the guns and handcuffs, under Florida law these were licensure inspections, not criminal searches, so no warrants were necessary."

(Radley Balko, "Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces")

Here's another interesting case that I found about from the book, but which was notable enough to even get its own Wikipedia article. You be the judge of how quintessentially American that is:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berwyn_Heights,_Maryland_mayor...

For me, the most scary part of it was the final words of the person responsible for it: "Quite frankly, we'd do it again. Tonight."

Another interesting thing was the long-term consequences. Because the target of the raid was a well-off, politically connected individual, they used their clout to mobilize support for a bill that required Maryland to produce an annual report on how its SWAT operates - where it is deployed, legal authority (arrest warrant, search warrant, exigent circumstances etc), what kind of crime, if any, it was targeting, and whether entry was forced or not. There's some eye-opening stuff there, like the fact that most SWAT deployments are serving search warrants for non-violent crimes, but they use forced entry more often than not:

http://goccp.maryland.gov/reports-publications/law-enforceme...

But even more interesting was the reaction of law enforcement agencies (and their unions) in the state to this bill - they were all adamantly opposed to it. It passed anyway, but only with a 5-year sunset clause as a concession; it was never renewed.

Do you really need 1,600 hours of training to learn how to sanitise a pair of scissors? Does that training actually make people less likely to stab someone in the head? Are there alternative routes for hairdressers to demonstrate their competence?

To my mind, it seems far more reasonable for these issues to be addressed through routine inspections and the prompt investigation of complaints. Qualifications may provide supporting evidence for the competence of a practitioner, but they are neither necessary nor sufficient.

Maybe a big chunk of it is an apprenticeship? You learn the skills over a few weeks and then spend the rest of the year practicing before you're fully licensed?

Ever try doing a professional hairstyle? It takes several hundred hours just to learn one. It takes several hours alone just to perform one, many times. I used to be a hair model. I had to sit in a chair in front of about 6,000 students at a casino while the designer explained his haircut to them. That was five hours alone, and my hair hadn't been touched. The next four hours were spent actually working on my hair.

However, very few people go to a barber for a shave anymore. It used to be that most people would go to a barber for a shave, and shaving yourself was unusual. Since the advent of the safety razor, cartridge razor, and electric razor, it's the other way around, where it is unusual to go to a barber for a shave. But in many states, training on shaving is a large part of the training for barbers.

In fact, it also used to be the case that barbers were the surgeons as well, though I don't know how much of that time overlapped with the licensing era.

I don't know how much of the remaining licensing process for modern barbers has to do with actual safety concerns, or is just inherited from the times of barbers being surgeons or doing the majority of shaving with straight razors.

That said, these licenses are typically about $10 and can be completed by online website in about an hour. I would expect something similar could work for hair cutting as well, but probably not for all the more exotic things like hair dying.

The restaurants require licensing out the ass, and I know there are ABC (alcohol handling) certifications required for servers, but cooks don't. At least one person (typically a manager) needs to be ServSafe certified, but that's not a requirement for every worker.

Meanwhile, a hairdresser must be licensed before they can step into a salon and do work. My sister and wife both worked in the industry, and I promise you they would both scoff at the idea of a 1 hour form/test for someone cutting hair. There's a ton of hygiene related things that they need to know to prevent disease transmission from cutting and handling hair daily.

You're plenty free to cut your own hair and that of your friends and family without a license. And you can drive your family around with minimal licensing. But there's a threshold you cross where licensing becomes mandatory.

I can drive a car in public and kill other people, not only my own family. Considering how safe cars are today it's even more likely my family will be safe while I kill other people.

Granted, these requirements loosen after a person reaches a certain age. But they still need to demonstrate an ability to drive and knowledge of the rules of the road before being licensed.

A CDL takes a lot training to earn, and you have to demonstrate a clean driving record for the previous 10 years.

Driving is one of the most dangerous things that ordinary people engage in. You're hundreds of times more likely to kill someone driving than doing any other activity, by virtue of the relative deadliness of motor vehicle accidents, and how much driving the ordinary person does.

That you need 1,600 hours of instruction to cut hair in California, far in excess of what any jurisdiction requires to get a license to drive, is the most blatant demonstration of the injustice of occupational licensing.

We should also really encourage people to wash their hands because that's super important, especially in environments like hospitals and daycares.

If licensing were merely focused on knowing your own limitations, avoiding harm, and transparency rather than being all mixed up with general education and sometimes extremely overbroad vocational training that is only tenuously connection to the actual vocation... I'd be less skeptical.

Obviously simply dumping licensing and having a snake-oil free for all is probably not an improvement. But the choice shouldn't need to be "no regulation at all" and "status quo regulation".

Additionally, software engineers that work on self-driving cars, rockets, any healthcare systems, etc, etc, etc?

No, you don't.

And software developers working on anything that handles personal data.

Most of their income comes from dying, high-lights, etc, which involve applying harsh chemicals to another person's hair. They need to understand what can be mixed safely and how to identify issues. Plus there's the whole sanitation aspect.

Even the person who wipes your butt in a hospital has more training than a stylist.

- 10 hours of training on state law - 75 hours of training on infection control - 200 hours of training on chemical hair control - another 1,265 hours on other topics (shampooing, hair shaping, hair coloring, styling, business skills, etc.).

Perhaps those first three areas are important perquisites to being licensed, but the extra 1200 hours seem like something the market could sort out without being a prerequisite for receiving a license.

In my personal opinion, I'm happy to rely on the reputation of a branded salon/barber shop/individual stylist. I've had both good hair cuts and bad hair cuts from state certified barbers. As far as I can tell the state doesn't provide any value to me other than limiting my choices. To the extent we might be concerned about poor people cutting people's hair without the state's permission, and doing so with non-optimum sanitary practices... well... poor people are already doing this and it doesn't seem to be causing any real public health crisis. I say we give it a shot in some locales and see what happens.

If you would like your market to be more than just those clients that request an Army buzz cut, you need to know those differences. My hair, for instance, looks terrible if given a straight chop with scissors. Because it's wavy and thick, it needs "thinning" all throughout its length to make it lie flat. Enforcing practicing on mannequins how to do just that without ruining someone's actual hair seems reasonable to me.

The hours requirement could be scaled down, and the process more streamlined certainly, but the point of going to cosmetology school isn't really to learn how to style hair, although that happens, it's to pass state boards. Then you can assistant in a salon and learn how to do something economically useful.

So, licensing does ensures the minimum quality.