In 2017, Candi Mentink and her husband, Todd Collard, of Calvin, Oklahoma, launched Caskets of Honor, an innovative business selling caskets wrapped in vinyl graphics to honor the deceased. Todd, a graphic designer, created designs ranging from religious and patriotic themes to sports and hobbies.
The business grew quickly, but after four years, they discovered something surprising: in Oklahoma—one of only three states alongside Virginia and South Carolina—it is illegal to sell caskets without a funeral director’s license.
Candi and Todd learned this lesson the hard way. When they advertised their caskets at the Tulsa State Fair in October 2021, an Oklahoma Funeral Board investigator posed as an interested customer. After Todd told him he would be happy to sell him a casket, the investigator informed them that they were breaking the law. The investigator proceeded to file a complaint with the Board, which pursued an administrative action against the couple, resulting in a $4,000 fine, among other requirements.
To continue operating their business, Candi and Todd had to do some creative maneuvering. Obtaining a funeral director license was out of the question. That would require two years in a mortuary science program, a one-year apprenticeship, and thousands of dollars in fees. On top of that, to fully comply with the law, they would also have to transform their workshop into an official funeral home, which would be prohibitively expensive—not to mention wasteful, since they don’t plan on becoming funeral directors or running a funeral home.
Their workaround was moving the company’s legal home to Texas and requiring online orders. This allowed them to operate under interstate commerce rules, though Oklahoma law still bars them from selling or advertising to Oklahomans from their shop, cutting into sales.
Lawmakers have repeatedly tried to repeal the restriction, but pushback from the Funeral Board and a private trade association has stalled reform.
As a result, Candi and Todd have decided to sue. Working with the Institute for Justice (IJ), they filed a lawsuit on February 4 challenging the law as unconstitutional under Oklahoma’s protections of economic freedom.
Commenting on the lawsuit, IJ Attorney Matt Liles highlighted the absurdity of the current law. “At the end of the day, a casket is just a box. It serves no health or safety purpose,” he said. “You shouldn’t need to spend years studying unrelated topics just to sell a box.”
The lawsuit drew particular attention to the protectionist nature of the current legal regime. “Oklahoma’s licensure requirements for casket sales have the intent and effect of establishing and maintaining a cartel for the sale of caskets within Oklahoma,” IJ writes. “…This anti-competitive cartel limits the lawful sale of caskets in Oklahoma to those who provide all other funeral services, while preventing individuals who do not wish to provide funeral services from offering caskets directly to the public. This scheme creates arbitrary and unreasonable barriers to conducting a lawful business and serves no legitimate interest related to public health, safety, or welfare.”
Vested Interests and the Power of Public Opinion
In his 1949 treatise Human Action, the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises warned about the ever-present threat of special interest groups that wish to stifle competition through legislation.
“There were and there will always be people whose selfish ambitions demand protection for vested interests and who hope to derive advantage from measures restricting competition,” he wrote. “Entrepreneurs grown old and tired and the decadent heirs of people who succeeded in the past dislike the agile parvenus who challenge their wealth and their eminent social position.”
It’s easy to see why Oklahoma’s funeral industry wants to block up-and-coming competitors like Caskets of Honor. Less competition allows them to charge higher prices and ignore evolving consumer preferences—such as customized casket designs. The Institute for Justice notes that “the average funeral in Oklahoma costs $5,671—18 percent higher than the cost in neighboring states.”
How do vested interests get away with policies so clearly harmful to competitors and consumers? Mises explains: “Whether or not their desire to make economic conditions rigid and to hinder improvements can be realized, depends on the climate of public opinion.” In other words, they succeed because public opinion is on their side—a fact reflected in the repeated failure of three bills to end Oklahoma’s protectionist law.
Such protectionism, Mises observed, would have been largely futile in the nineteenth century, when classical liberalism prevailed. “But today,” he wrote, “it is deemed a legitimate task of government to prevent an efficient man from competing with the less efficient. Public opinion sympathizes with the demands of powerful pressure groups to stop progress.”
Changing that public opinion is challenging, but one promising approach is to tell the stories of entrepreneurs like Candi and Todd. When people see the real-world impact of protectionist policies, the injustice becomes impossible to ignore.
