I’m normally a critic of overly aggressive occupational licensing schemes, but I have to give Texas Representative Bill Zedler some credit for his bill to require strippers to get licenses. Zedler is straightforward about the fact that he’s not trying to do anything other than make it harder to strip for a living, because he doesn’t think people should do it.
That’s a good debate to have in the particular case of stripping, and it’s great to recognize that in practice this is the typical use of occupational licensing. Normally the specific issue is that incumbents want to make it more difficult for new people to enter the profession rather than legislators not approving of the profession’s existence, but either way the basic shape is clear—licensing is a barrier to entry and that’s what Zedler likes about it.
