The folks from the Institute for Justice have an opinion piece in today's Wall Street Journal entitled "Want Jobs? Cut Local Regulations" (subscription only). I was introduced to this group at the Right Online Conference in Minneapolis this year. They file lawsuits on behalf of small business people fighting city hall red tape. The example they gave was this video for food truck vendors in El Paso.
The focus in the WSJ piece is on state occupational licensing as a barrier to entry into the workforce,
"Only one in 20 workers needed the government's permission to pursue their chosen occupation in the 1950s....Today that figure is nearly one in three."
"In Alabama, it takes 700 hours of training to become a manicurist."
This is along the same lines as Walter Russell Mead's call for more "bad" jobs,
"When politicians talk about creating jobs, they always talk about creating “good” jobs. That is all very well, but unless there are bad jobs and lots of them, people in the inner cities will have a hard time getting on the ladder at all, much less climbing into the middle class."
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