West Virginia Barber’s Arrest Shows Failings Of The Crony Capitalist Bureaucratic State

Some would say that the arrest is not so much a “failing” of the regulatory state, as much as it is a logical manifestation of a regulatory state that is out of control.

Note that it was a competitor who called the police on this fellow.

(From The Federalist)

This combination of old-fashioned values led to the soft-spoken barber’s arrest this spring. His story shows how governments’ uncoordinated coronavirus response has caught working Americans in its crossfire—and how the apparatus of occupational licensing has functioned as the state’s enforcement mechanism to shut down small business.