The news recently has been filled with signs that some of Texas’s more nonsensical occupational regulations — documented by this newspaper (about nurses, auto parts recycling, and barbers among others) over the past couple of years — may be on their way out.
On Monday, U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks issued a ruling that the state’s rules for hair-braiders, administered by the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, were “irrational.” Rather than oversee the profession for what it actually did, the state instead had lumped braiders together with cosmetologists.
That had resulted in some puzzling requirements. For example, Dallas braider Isis Brantley’s school, which brought the lawsuit, had to install five sinks to follow state rules — even though hair-braiders don’t wash hair. Here’s Sparks’s decision (courtesy of the Wall Street Journal).
Then, on Thursday, governor-in-waiting Greg Abbott said he was in favor of repealing a few other pesky occupational regulations. “Licensing doctors makes sense, but why do we need a license for junk dealers or a shampoo apprentice?” Abbott said at Texas Public Policy Foundation’s annual Policy Orientation conference (as quoted in this story from the Texas Tribune). “Those are the kinds of things you see in California, not in the state of Texas.”
Read more at statesman.com.