It’s just a piece of cotton thread.

And yet, in order to use that simple piece of thread in Arizona for the popular practice of removing unwanted facial hair, the state’s Board of Cosmetology demanded that highly skilled entrepreneurs sit through 600 hours of classroom instruction—with a price tag of up to $10,000.

And here’s the kicker:  not one hour of instruction teaches anything about threading:

Thankfully, five Arizona threading entrepreneurs teamed up with the Institute for Justice and fought back. And this week, they proved that you can stand up to government officials to defend your civil rights—and win.

As Institute for Justice Arizona Chapter Executive Director Tim Keller explains in the video above:

Threading is such a safe and sanitary practice that Arizona’s neighboring states – California, Utah and Nevada – have all exempted braiders from their states cosmetology licensing schemes.   Our goal is to restore the right to earn an honest living to its proper role as a fundamental right in Arizona.

And so last June, the entrepreneurs and IJ filed a lawsuit challenging the Board’s requirement that Arizona threaders first obtain a cosmetology license in order to use a single piece of cotton thread to remove facial hair.  And now those same entrepreneurs have joined the Arizona Attorney General’s Office in asking a Superior Court judge to sign a Consent Judgment that will end the litigation and prevent the Board from requiring threaders to become licensed cosmetologists.

Once the Consent Judgment is signed, every threader in Arizona will be able to work without fear of citations, fines or harassment from the Board.

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From Florida’s Herald Tribune:

When President Barack Obama touted the passage of the $787 billion federal stimulus bill a year ago, he highlighted billions of dollars for higher education to help retrain workers for the new economy.

But an examination of government records shows that some of the biggest recipients of $17 billion in federal educational grants have been online universities, cosmetology academies, massage therapy schools and other profitmaking career training schools – and not traditional public universities and colleges.

Many of the for-profit schools have spotty graduation and placement records, critics contend, and do not provide the educational foundation of traditional colleges and universities.

In Sarasota County, the Sun State College of Hair Design, the Sarasota School of Massage Therapy and Sarasota’s Fashion Focus Hair Academy combined to receive $689,000 in Pell Grant stimulus funding in 2009, more than the New College of Florida, a state-sponsored school with more than 800 students in Sarasota, and the Ringling College of Art & Design, a private, nonprofit school with about 1,200 students that is also in Sarasota.

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