How Unions Used Licensing to Crush Ethnic Barbershops

Minimum wage laws too were used by unions to discriminate against ethic minorities.

Something one should always remember also is that Jim Crowe laws in the South were a particularly repugnant example of big government. Big government often works against the interests of minorities.

(From Mises)

Now, a new book by Douglas Bristol examines how barbershops became an economic fixture for black business owners and black entrepreneurs during the 19th-century, both before and after the Civil War. Bristol’s book, Knights of the Razor: Black Barbers in Slavery and Freedom,  examines  not only how barber shops formed both a social and economic function within the black community, but also how barbers were able to build barbershop-based capital into other ventures such as insurance firms…

…Bristol notes, however, that after the Civil War German immigrants used political influence through labor unions to lobby and win government regulation of barbershops through licensing.

Click here for the article.

http://www.againstcronycapitalism.org/