Pay attention, beauty-loving Americans: the jack-booted thugs of Big Government are coming to take away your right to burn people's skin with a laser without any medical training whatsoever.

Who died and made so-called "lawmakers" god? I know. But the WSJ reports that "medical spas," which are places that dole out beauty/ torture treatments like laser-blasting and chemical-peeling and fat-sucking and eyelid-slicing and injection-injecting, are increasingly being regulated as if they were involved in some sort of medical procedure business, rather than just in fly-by-night beautification. In the good old days, any old uneducated meth addict could start their own "Med Spa" and go to work poking needles into the bodies of desperate women, thereby living the American dream of entrepreneurship. No more; now, states across America are beginning to pass laws saying that one of those, whatchamacallit, doctors has to be involved in these places somehow.

As if Rhonda is not good enough to suck your fat through a suction tube, just because she didn't go to "medical school." What's the worst that could happen?

A month ago, Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley signed a new law directing the state health department to oversee cosmetic-surgery facilities after one woman died and two others became seriously ill with Group A streptococcus infections traced to liposuction at a Baltimore clinic.

Florida now requires that liposuctions removing more than two pounds of fat be performed in a state-licensed surgical center with emergency equipment on hand, after two women died from overdoses of lidocaine, a local anesthetic.

Liposuctions removing 1.9 pounds of fat can still be performed by uneducated meth addicts, in Florida.

[WSJ. Photo: Rick Hall/ Flickr]