When you think about a highly aggressive cartel teaming up with politicians to pass protectionist laws that kick entrepreneurs out of work, you probably don’t think about interior designers.

But you should.

The American Society of Interior Designers (ASID) represents less than 3 percent of all designers, but its members have designated themselves as spokespeople for the entire industry. ASID has spent over 30 years and millions of dollars lobbying from coast to coast for interior design licensing schemes.  Not surprisingly, the schemes they propose would force all interior designers to have the exact same credentials as required for membership in ASID.

The group has worked relentlessly to enlist state legislatures in its campaign for total industry cartelization. The Institute for Justice has documented these efforts in a study titled “Designing Cartels.”

Florida is ground zero right now in this epic battle.

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The Institute for Justice has been vindicating the rights of entrepreneurs for the last twenty years.

Across the country, IJ has teamed up with casket makers, florists, hairbraiders, horse teeth-floaters, interior designers, sign-hangers, taxi-drivers, trash haulers, vintners and numerous other Americans to secure their basic right to earn an honest living.

This week, we are proud to announce a new, nationwide effort in our fight for economic liberty:  Our National Street Vending Initiative.

From coast to coast, we will team up with mobile food vending entrepreneurs whenever their rights come under attack, filing lawsuits and engaging in grassroots activism and media efforts.

In conjunction with the launch of this initiative, we have filed a major federal lawsuit against the city of El Paso Texas:

For thousands of years, vending has been a way for entrepreneurs to provide for themselves and their families.  In the United States, this ancient trade is more popular than ever.  By 2007, over 760,000 vending businesses were operating in the country.  And consumers love them, so they continue to grow.

The Economist magazine predicted that in 2011 food vendors would create “[t]he biggest shift in America’s culinary landscape” and that “some of the best food Americans eat may come from a food truck.”

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What do you get when you mix bureaucrats with a bunch of adorable puppies?

In Kim Houghton’s case, you get a major First Amendment lawsuit.

Kim Houghton decided after a successful, 20-year career in advertising that she wanted more.  She wanted to realize her American Dream and become an entrepreneur in a business focused on dogs.

She had the gumption to quit her job and make her dream come true:  Wag More Dogs is a high-end canine daycare located next to a popular dog park in Arlington, Virginia.  Kim commissioned an outdoor mural on her wall that has cartoon dogs, bones and paw prints as a way to give something back to the park she’d frequented for years, and build up some good will for her new business.

The mural was a big hit.  After all, who doesn’t like puppies?   Things were smooth for a few months.

And then Arlington bureaucrats got involved.

Officials blocked Kim’s building permit and told her that she could not open unless she painted over the mural or covered it with a blue tarp.

Her crime?

Painting a piece of art that—in the eyes of government officials—had too strong a “relationship” to her business.

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Carl Mitz is a third-generation horseman.  The Texan is widely known as one of the nation’s best horse dentists.  He’s treated the teeth of over 100,000 horses and has clients in over 30 states.

But Texas bureaucrats tried for years to shut him down.

In a classic case of economic protectionism, Carl and all other Texas equine dentists were told they had to spend up to $100,000 and four years at veterinary school, where they would learn next to nothing about caring for horses’ teeth, or else abandon their occupation.  To top it off, they were threatened with massive fines and even jail.

Instead of giving up his American Dream, Carl teamed up with other Texas horsemen and the Institute for Justice to fight for their right to earn an honest living.

And this week, they won.

On Tuesday, a Texas judge struck down the effort by the Texas Board of Veterinary Medical Examiners to put equine dentists like Carl—known as floaters—out of business and leave the state’s approximately one million horses without proper dental care.

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Let’s say you have a knack for cutting hair.  If you live in Florida, guess how many hours of government-mandated instruction you’d be forced to sit through before you can become a barber?

1,200.

That’s right, well over a thousand hours.  Plus, you’d have to pay thousands of dollars to cover the cost of your classes and pass a written exam.  Only then will the government give you a license—that is, permission to cut hair.

Now what happens if you’re already a successful barber but didn’t have a chance to stop working and jump through all the hoops needed to get that license?

Armed government agents could raid your business and handcuff you in front of your clients. Indeed, this is already happening.  Institute for Justice economic-liberty expert Paul Sherman explains:

According to the Orlando Sentinel:

As many as 14 armed Orange County deputies, including narcotics agents, stormed Strictly Skillz barbershop during business hours on a Saturday in August, handcuffing barbers in front of customers during a busy back-to-school weekend.

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Hey mom and dads, it’s election week!  Does your child like to argue?  Does he like to boss his younger siblings around?  Does he love the sound of his own voice?

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, your child is a natural born politician.  Now to ensure his success in the political world, send him to Camp Politics for a three-week intensive training program:

Once he gets elected to office, the most important thing for him to learn is how to stay there.  If he does a bad job, people will want to get him out of office.  So your child will need to learn how to silence those that want to speak out against him.

Of course, this violates basic free speech rights.  But Camp Politics has figured out a sure-fire way around the First Amendment that means politics will remain a game for special interests and political insiders.

It’s called campaign finance laws.

We all know that speaking takes money.  And the only way ordinary Americans can speak out effectively about politics is to pool their resources with their friends and neighbors.  But campaign finance laws limit the amount of money people can spend on political ads and organizing and they wrap people in red tape to the point that they can’t even speak!

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Nationwide, government at every level is requiring more and more of the workforce to get its permission just to earn a living.

In the 1950s, only about 5 percent of the workforce needed a government license to do their job. Today, that number is over 30 percent.  And governments impose all kinds of other requirements that make it hard for would-be entrepreneurs to start and grow small businesses.

Entrepreneurs like Chuck, here:

Unemployment in the United States has now topped 9.5 percent for 14 straight months—the longest stretch since the Great Depression.  Nearly 14.8 million people were unemployed last month.

Consider the nation’s capital.

Year after year, Washington, D.C., is ranked the worst place in the United States to start a small business. How can the District change its ways to allow entrepreneurs to create more jobs and opportunity?

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Carla Main wrote an outstanding book called Bulldozed.  A veteran journalist, she brought to life a heart-wrenching, true-life tale of eminent domain abuse in a Texas fishing town.  She told the truth.  And for that, she’s being sued.

Today, Carla is fighting back.

This morning, Carla asked a Texas appeals court to dismiss a defamation lawsuit filed against here by a developer involved in the Texas case.

Some background:

The Texas developer behind this abuse project is H. Walker Royall.  As the video makes clear, millions of taxpayer dollars later, the project is now an epic debacle.

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In Washington, DC, talking about the Bill of Rights can land you in jail for 90 days.

Our nation’s capital has a licensing scheme in place that makes it illegal for anyone to “guide or escort” anyone else for hire without first getting the government’s permission. To get the license, which the Washington Post editorial board labeled a Tour de farce, eager entrepreneurs must first pay hundreds of dollars in fees, fill out a bunch of forms and pass an arbitrary test.

That is, they need to jump through all sorts of needless hoops before they’re allowed to speak.

[Please help promote this video by voting it up and commenting on reddit here.]

The bottom line is that the Constitution protects your right to communicate for a living, whether you are a journalist, a stand-up comedian, a musician, or a tour guide.  The government cannot be in the business of deciding who may speak and who may not.

That is why two Washington, DC, tour guides—Tonia Edwards and Bill Main, who run a company called Segs in the City—joined forces with the Institute for Justice to file a major federal lawsuit challenging DC’s tour-guide licensing scheme as a violation of their fundamental constitutional rights. Video and photos of the press conference are online.

Nearly every day, Tonia and Bill teach a group of people how to ride Segways and then take them around Washington, DC, on a tour of the city.  Their business is located near the National Archives, so one of the things they tell their customers is where the Bill of Rights is located.  For this, the city government could throw them in prison for three months.

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Abbot Justin Brown and his fellow monks are being threatened with crippling fines and even jail time.  Their crime?  Selling caskets.

Today, they are fighting back in a big way.

In 1889, a group of monks from Indiana fulfilled their dream of establishing a monastery in the Gulf South.  The monastic lifestyle they embody is simple and contemplative.  Their creation, the Saint Joseph Abbey, has had a powerful and positive impact in Louisiana.

For several centuries, monks have supported themselves financially by excelling at common trades such as farming and brewing beer.  The monks at Saint Joseph Abbey have been able to preserve and maintain their quiet lifestyle through farming and harvesting timber.

The monks make simple wooden caskets in which to bury themselves. In the early 1990s, Bishops began requesting the caskets, which led to inquiries from other interested people.  The demand continued to build:   People were eager to share in the monks’ view of the simplicity and unity of life and death through burial in a simple monastic casket.

As Abbot Justin Brown puts it:

The monks of Saint Joseph Abbey have been making caskets for over a hundred years.  People who ask for them want to share in that noble simplicity that our coffins express. We’re not a wealthy monastery and we need the income that Saint Joseph Woodworks could generate for the health care and the education of our own monks.

On November 1, 2007, the monks opened their Saint Joseph Woodworks.  But before they could sell even one casket, they were threatened with crippling fines, jail time and even a lawsuit.

Why?

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Julie Murphy is only seven years old, but she embodies the classic American zeal for entrepreneurship.

She learned about lemonade stands after seeing one in a cartoon.  She got excited and wanted to open one of her own.  And so Julie’s mother worked with her to get everything together and set up shop at a fair in Northeast Portland, Oregon.

20 minutes after opening, a government official approached and asked for their $120 occupational license.  Of course, they had no license.

And so 7-year-old Julie, the budding entrepreneur, was told to shut down her lemonade stand or face $500 in fines.

Julie and her mother were encouraged by others to keep the stand open and ask for donations instead.  Business picked up, and the regulators returned.  This time they made Julie cry.  They also got their wish:  Julie’s mom shut down the lemonade stand.

Unfortunately, this is not an isolated case of licensing gone wild.  Rather it is a classic example of a national problem that affects countless people in America every day.  Institute for Justice President Chip Mellor wrote this week in the Washington Times:

Mired in a nationwide jobless recovery, state and local governments have the power to create jobs and transform communities if they do one simple thing: Get out of the way of aspiring entrepreneurs.

Unfortunately for small businesses, however, laws restricting economic liberty are becoming more commonplace in America. Consider that since the 1950s, the percentage of occupations in the United States that require people to obtain permission from the government in the form of a license before they can pursue their chosen occupation has grown from a mere 5 percent to more than 30 percent.

Consider a few recent IJ cases:

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If government is serious about job creation, it should get out of the way of the entrepreneurs who actually create them.

That is the message of a new campaign launched this week by the Institute for Justice—the nation’s leading legal advocate for economic liberty. A series of studies called The Power of One Entrepreneur highlight the tremendous impact that a single entrepreneur can have on their family, employees, community, other entrepreneurs and beyond.

Consider Melony Armstrong of Tupelo, Mississippi.

Melony is an African hairbraider and a mother of four.  She is the owner of Naturally Speaking, a hairbraiding salon that serves her community and has employed dozens of women.  In addition, Melony has taught more than 125 individuals how to braid.

But before she could even open her doors, she had to battle through mountains of red tape. The state forced her to spend 300 hours in cosmetology classes.  And to teach others how to braid, she had to obtain a special license that required over 3,000 hours of additional classes.  Here’s the kicker:  In all of this government-mandating training, she received no actual instruction in hairbraiding.

In August 2004, Melony teamed up with the Institute for Justice to challenge these needless barriers that had the effect of keeping grassroots entrepreneurs just like her from being able to open their own businesses. Less than a year later, her case resulted in a new law that lifted the restrictions, paving the way for hairbraiding entrepreneurship throughout the state.

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As many thrills as he sends up Chris Matthews’ leg and despite his ability to walk on water, Barack Obama like all legislators cannot create jobs.  All any politician can do is take resources from the private sector and allocate them according to his or her own fancy, often towards favored constituencies, at a prohibitive and wasteful cost.

Instead of letting individuals determine how best to allocate land, labor and capital based upon their own subjective values and aspirations, the government in its self-attributed divine wisdom believes it is morally right for it to squander other people’s money.  Apparently, we are not ourselves capable of deciding how to dispense with our property, and deal with the consequences of such actions good or bad.

Then again, in our “social”ist democracy we feel it proper that government take care of our health and our retirement under the auspice of the “public good.”  So what of a little more state paternalism?  To that I say, the so-called public good is a public bad because when the collective supplants the individual, society fails.  If people would rather have the government take care of such things then take care of them themselves, then the best we can hope for is that the government not monopolize such goods and services but allow for unobstructed private competition.

In any event, to ascribe the word “sector” to the limitless Unconstitutional and unnecessary public “businesses” is pure subterfuge.  The plunder sector is the only accurate title for what the government does outside its strict Constitutional scope.

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