Casket Licenses

Benedictine Monks at St. Joseph Abbey started making hand-crafted caskets after Hurricane Katrina knocked down a large portion of a pine forest they own. But it turns out they didn’t count on the coffin cartel:

But now, local funeral directors are trying to put a lid on the monks’ activities. The state funeral regulatory board, dominated by industry members, is enforcing a Louisiana law that makes it a crime for anyone but a licensed parlor to sell “funeral merchandise.” The morticians are serious. Violators such as the monks can land in jail for up to 180 days.

You can understand a public health concern with certain aspects of working with dead bodies, but casket-making doesn’t fit the bill. And once again you see that a board dominated by industry insiders becomes more about reducing competition than anything else. The story’s in the papers because the libertarian Institute for Justice is helping the monks with a lawsuit, but the view that public policy should encourage rather than discourage competition is one progressives should be able to easily embrace.