All across the globe, people see the United States as a land of opportunity and dream of making their way here to work hard and enjoy the prosperity that our system of laws helps provide. Cindy Vong made that dream a reality by emigrating from Vietnam, becoming a U.S. citizen, and starting her own nail salon in Gilbert, Arizona. Thanks to a state occupational-licensing scheme, however, Ms. Vong may no longer be free to pursue her vision of happiness.
The Arizona Board of Cosmetology—yes, that’s an actual entity—got wind that Ms. Vong’s spa offered a treatment that uses small fish to exfoliate dead skin from the feet. This is a perfectly safe practice popular in East Asia and the Middle East. Learning that the Board intended to apply its exfoliation-instrument sterilization standards to her fish—how does one sterilize a fish?—Ms. Vong volunteered her spa as a test project until the Board was able to revise its existing rules to address this increasingly popular treatment. Without so much as bothering to evaluate whether the fish treatment is unsafe—there is no such evidence anywhere—the Board ignored her request and, summarily concluding the treatment unsafe, shut down Ms. Vong’s business. So much for “Land of the Free.”
Represented by our friends at the Goldwater Institute, Ms. Vong fought back, bringing a constitutional challenge against the Board’s action all the way to Arizona’s high court. Unfortunately, that court deferred to the Board’s “safety” concerns, finding there to be a “reasonably conceivable state of facts that could provide a rational basis” for the regulation. In other words, because a state-empowered group of Ms. Vong’s competitors offered a better-than-completely-ridiculous pretext for telling her how to run her business, the court would entertain no legal challenge.
Read more at http://www.cato.org/blog/another-fishy-regulation
No comments:
Post a Comment