Cato podcast, description follows:
Occupational licensing boards demand that hair braiders either spend thousands of dollars and hours to become cosmetologists or be put out of business. Paul Avelar with the Institute for Justice is challenging those requirements.
“The right and left agree — too many occupations are overregulated” [Morris Kleiner, New York Times via Peter Van Doren, Cato; Arnold Kling]
Coyote advances a geographically based hypothesis. Since occupational licensure is found in ethnically uniform nations, it can hardly owe its origins exclusively to this sort of tension. In the common American pattern, however, where one ethnic group dominates a given trade or occupation for a time and then gives way to or is challenged by a newer ethnic group, it may be easier to assemble political coalitions that slow down the advance of the newcomers. Milton Friedman’s famous chapter on occupational licensure from Capitalism and Freedom is here.