Government cracking down on Kids' Lemonade Stands
Iain Murray has a useful discussion here.
In the past couple of months, police have put children’s lemonade stands out of business in Texas, Georgia, Wisconsin, Iowa, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. (There’s a great map, with links to the news stories, here.)
The kids have been taught a lesson, but it’s one we should learn, too: You can’t be an entrepreneur in modern-day America without bureaucrats giving you permission in the first place.
The costs of regulation today amount to $10,000 per employee per year for small businesses in the U.S. That’s why the advert where a little girl borrows her father’s phone to help run her lemonade stand and ends up running a multinational just can’t happen. The bureaucrats just wouldn’t let her do it without jumping through the costly bureaucratic hoops first. . . .
Labels: Regulation
posted by John Lott at 9:00 PM
1 Comments:
Markie Marxist sez: "That'll teach those little capitalists to engage in private enterprise! Entrepreneurial activity is illegal under communism! It's exploitative, or something like that. Who cares if people are hot and thirsty and would love a drink of lemonade? We commies have made it illegal, so those pesky kids can't do it! Or it's off to the gulag with them! They can make lemonade in the gulag in Northern Alaska! If they can thaw the lemons. Maybe we can spend some stimulus funds on child-sized handcuffs for police departments, to help with the crackdown. We'll just say that the kiddie cuff money is for 'assistance in achieving law enforcement objectives'. That sounds better. After all, we don't want people to think that we're being mean to children."
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