Imagine taking your computer in for basic repairs and being told that the repair shop you've relied on for years can no longer do the work because the owner doesn't hold a state-issued private investigator's license.

Worse, imagine that if you ask the company to perform the repairs anyway, you and the person who repaired your computer could go to jail for a year and pay $14,000 in penalties.

Thousands of Texas computer repair shops and their customers now face this scenario in real life due to a recent change in the law. Under legislation brought on behalf of the private investigations industry and passed last year, any computer repair shop that analyzes data on a customer's computer must have a government-issued private investigator's license if the analysis involves data that says something about the actions of a third party.

The law is so broad that it would include looking at who a child has been chatting with on the Internet or whether an employee has been using a computer to gamble while at work. It could also include a computer repair that determined that a spouse unknowingly downloaded a virus onto the computer while visiting a disreputable website. Computer repair is now a decades-old profession. It is performed by talented, tech-savvy entrepreneurs - without incident - every day in nearly every city in Texas.

These computer repair shops cannot afford to get an investigator's license because the law requires them to either have a criminal justice degree or complete a three-year apprenticeship under a licensed investigator.

The newly formed Institute for Justice Texas Chapter (IJ-TX) challenged the law this week by filing suit against the Texas Private Security Board (the state agency charged with licensing private investigators) on behalf of computer repair companies and their customers.

IJ-TX is a public interest law firm that challenges unconstitutional restrictions on individual liberties in the areas of property rights, free speech, educational choice and - as here - the right to earn an honest living.

The new law was passed without input from the computer repair industry. The only people who testified before the Legislature were representatives from the Private Security Board and private investigations industry lobbyists.

Now, through a series of increasingly broad interpretations, the Private Security Board has specifically put computer repair companies on notice.

The Board has said that computer repair companies should "be aware" that if they conduct an "investigation" (a very broad concept that includes many forms of data analysis) without a private investigator's license, they have committed a crime.

This is typical of how cartels operate.

Under the rubric of concern for so-called public safety, they first push for seemingly modest changes in the law. Then, with the change in place, they push for aggressive and broad interpretations of the law to push competitors out of the marketplace.

By forcing computer repair shops out of the data analysis market, private investigators want to force Texas consumers to use PIs for even basic computer questions such as "how was my computer used and by whom?"

This law was not passed in response to a public epidemic of rogue computer repair shops ripping off their customers. It was passed, quietly and behind the scenes, at the behest of private investigators looking to use government to quash competition.

Texas courts should examine laws like this to determine whether they constitute a legitimate exercise of the government's police power. When, as here, the laws cannot be justified, our courts should strike them down.

In so many industries across our state, government-enforced cartels are limiting competition, driving up prices and reducing to quality of service.

It is time entrepreneurs and consumers questioned this awesome and nearly unbridled power of government to interfere with our daily life, and that is what the Institute for Justice Texas Chapter intends to do.

Matt Miller is the executive director of the Institute for Justice Texas Chapter in Austin.