The war on lemonade stands is in full gear across America. The summer tradition that has gone on freely for generations is now under fire from greedy bureaucrats intent on lining their pockets… okay, not their own pockets… just that of their bureaucracies.
God forbid some kids should sell lemonade without spending a few hundred dollars on permission slips, or as they are known by the bureaucratic buffoons, business licenses and day permits.
I wrote about one case a few weeks ago, and while it horrified me that everyone from the chief of police on down felt they were justified in harassing a couple of young girls trying to earn some money for a holiday, clearly the bureaucrats and police chief did not share my disgust.
Here, then, is a brief rundown of the lowest and most disturbing battles in the 2011 War on Lemonade:
- In Coralville, Iowa, Coralville Police shut down at least three lemonade stands run by children as young as 4 years old. Permits to run those lemonade stands would cost $400 each.
- Georgia police shut down a lemonade stand run by three girls trying to earn some cash to go to the local water park. Georgia Police weren’t going to let that happen, though. Citing health concerns, Midway Police Chief Kelly Morningstar actually had the audacity to say police “didn’t know how the lemonade was made, who made it or what was in it.”
- The Appleton, Wisconsin, city council recently passed a bylaw preventing anyone form running a lemonade stand within two blocks of local events. Yes, it actually singled out lemonade stands.
- Montgomery County bylaw morons actually fined the parents of one child $500 for running her illegal lemonade stand. The kicker here is the she was trying to raise money for charity.
Don’t these morons have anything better to do with their time?
This is hardly a comprehensive list. You can find a lot more examples at http://www.lemonadefreedom.com/, the home of Lemonade Freedom Day.
Across the nation there are local ordinances that make it illegal for our kids to put up a lemonade stand on the front lawn. Citing health concerns, cities and towns across America have decided to clamp down on the national health disaster that is lemonade stands.
Children clearly can’t be trusted to use the right lemons, can they? The parents of those children clearly can’t be trusted either.
That is the message that’s being sent, after all, isn’t it? We the people cannot be trusted with the most mundane of activities; from speaking our minds to defending ourselves and our loved ones, all the way down to our children earning a few bucks selling lemonade to their neighbours on a hot summers day.
Mitch Gross, a member of the Coralville City Council, said he believes the city will learn a lesson from this. Gross said he expects future ordinances to apply only for vendors who set out to “make a profit.”
“It was never our intent to shut down kid’s lemonade stands,” Gross said. “We never really thought about it.”
Likewise in Appleton, where Alderman Peter Stueck was quoted saying:
“My son went over there and saw what happened. He came over and chewed me out for 10 minutes because this is happening.”
Stueck says he had no idea the ordinance would affect people like Lydia Mann.
That’s the problem though, isn’t it? The bureaucrats never think about the consequences of their stupid actions.
The Law of Unintended Consequences reigns supreme. Our tunnel-visioned buffoons just continue to pass law after law with no regard for how it will actually be applied to us.
Mitch Gross and Peter Stueck claim they never meant to shut down kids’ lemonade stands…
Really? Then why are they?
This is the War on Lemonade, all right… but that war is fueled by something much larger and much more sinister than a mere hatred of little girls selling lemonade… it’s fueled by the hatred of our God-given Rights and Freedoms.
Every single one of them.
Please join with all the brave men and women who will be helping their children host a lemonade stand on August 20th,2011.
So far, the thugs with badges and guns have won the day in the War on Lemonade, but this war is far from over.
On August 20th, we fight back.
Visit LemonadeFreedom.com for all the details.
Nice work Christopher…
A tempest in a teacup on the surface but you are correct…there is something much larger and certainly more insidious at work here..
I am always amazed at the sort of person it takes to work in government…..it used to be a calling, a willingness or desire to serve and give something back….
But now the “Civil Service” neither serves nor is civil…it it parasitic and predatory with an unparallelled arrogance and contempt for those it is called upon to serve….
The “Legalize Lemonade” video is too funny to keep to myself.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXvd0MnSz6I&feature=player_embedded
Matt of “tshirtguerrilla” contends that the police, who gave such an
outrageously stupid explanation as to why one lemonade stand was shut down
(something about kids’ safety due to known registered sex offenders living in
the neighborhood), should have stuck with their standard “no comment” answer!
From watching some of the other “Lemonade Liberation” videos, it looks like what has happened in most if not all these towns is that overzealous bozo councillors, in their lust for money and who are now looking stupid, have penned ordinances without rational thought about how the bylaw would implicate such common childhood activities as selling lemonade and Girl Scout cookies. (Hint: Girl Scout cookies are inspected before the manufacturer boxes them, so lame-brained politicians don’t have to worry about contamination issues.)
Shutting down the age-old tradition of Brownies and Girl Scouts going
out on their annual, fund-raising cookie-sale campaigns is blasphemous–especially banning the sales from the historic homeplace of the organization’s founder Juliette Gordon Low down in Savannah, Georgia.
How low can these idiotic, Marxist money-grabbing politicians go? Well, obviously pretty low. In some cases, the do-gooder politicians claimed to be “protecting” legitimate food vendors from the likes of these vulturous criminal tykes.
The politicians are looking so ignorant with bad publicity that they are
in some cases apologizing to the victims. The hundreds of dollars they
want for a vendor’s permit or business license covers the entire year. But the children would be expected to pay the $180 to $200, or more, in fees, just to set up a lemonade stand for a few days during the summer ($50 per day, in some jurisdictions).
But the authorities claim that without the permit or license there is no way to guarantee food safety or determine what’s in the ice cubes. (Hint: frozen water, therefore, if the ice cubes are contaminated or the water in the lemonade doesn’t meet safety standards, it’s because the city isn’t doing a proper job of overseeing the safety of its water-supply system.)
Further, buddy, a city hall tax-collecting clerk doesn’t do the safety-check chore, either. A health inspector would have to enter the picture later.
This is just a city hall money-grab…reminds me of the Somalia guerillas’ tax-collecting methods of holding foreigners hostage at gunpoint until the arbitrary extortion fees are paid by the company bosses back home…only in these cases, the hostages are the local children and the parents are the “company bosses” who have to pay the arbitrary extortion fees.
Kids are smart, though, and they outsmarted the local politicians at their own game. Rah-rah! In some jurisdictions the little men and women simply moved their portable sawhorse-and-plywood tables and colorful felt-pen signs to adjacent counties and ran their stands alongside “farmer’s markets” who can sell vegetables and flowers roadside without paying permission penalties.
Where the kids relocated enjoyed more traffic than their small-town neighborhood streets, anyway, so they realize more earnings than if they had stayed in their front yards. That’s known as the “gotcha law”. And their respective towns lose out on the “good publicity” that would have been generated by leaving these enthusiastic, clean-cut short citizens the hell alone.
I think the War on Lemonade is one war the civic governments are wishing they hadn’t launched. It has backfired into a colossal failure like everything else that the bureaucrats interfere in with “good intentions”, i.e., the city enforcers threatening to send a Michigan organic gardener to jail for 93 days for teaching her children the art of growing criminal tomatoes and peppers in the front yard.
It doesn’t sound like Americans have progressed very far since the civil disobedience they displayed in December, 1773. The fed-up colonists answered the British’s demand for a stiff Tea Tax by throwing the goods overboard into the harbor. That little Boston Tea Party incident was the final straw that sparked the important American Revolution in which the colonists emerged victorious with their hard-fought independence and freedoms snatched from the British masters.
The modern-day version of events is for city halls across America to demand stiff taxes on children’s lemonade stands. And law enforcers are obligated to uphold the stupidity by shutting down the young criminals and levying hefty fines to teach a lesson to the criminals’ parents who now have delinquents as young as four-years-old on their hands who will no doubt grow up to be felons.
Somehow, grown-ups ganging up on defenseless children over a Lemonade Tax is much more despicable than the Tea Tax over which grown-ups ganged up on grown-ups who had a better chance of defending themselves against somebody their own size.
According to one of several pieces written on this subject, the Washington Times Editorial “Lemonade Tyranny” published the following on August 8th:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/aug/5/lemonade-tyranny/
“On Aug. 20, over a hundred people have so far pledged to gather on the Capitol’s west lawn to protest the petty bureaucracy that thinks threatening children with fines is a proper use of taxpayer resources. The organizers promise that they are ready to go to jail for the ultimate act of civil disobedience: offering a refreshing cup of lemonade on a sultry afternoon on the nation’s front lawn for 10 cents.
“Close to 2,000 have signed up on Facebook for nationwide pro-lemonade events after a father of two set up a page advertising ‘Lemonade Liberation Day’.
“Organizer Robert Fernandes expected just a few of his friends would be interested, but in just a week his lemonadefreedom.com website has attracted far more attention than he expected….
“Mr. Fernandes has charted incidents where police and code inspectors were dispatched to stop kids from selling lemonade, cookies and similar treats in California, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Maryland, Missouri, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Texas and Wisconsin. ‘I think that’s the wrong message to send kids,’ he said. ‘It’s telling them just go in the back and play video games. Don’t be a productive member of society. We don’t need you.’”
Is Secretary Janet Napolitano planning to unleash her Homeland Security Hounds on these young “terrorists” like she authorized the sexual molestation of suspected baby- and-child “terrorists” at major airports across America? I know of parents who won’t fly because they refuse to expose their children to such gross state-perpetrated indecencies.
Adults will take a lot of abuse heaped on themselves, i.e., the silent dancers celebrating Thomas Jefferson’s birthday at the Jefferson Memorial arrested for demonstrating without a permit, 2008 and 2011. But even the worst hard-boiled adult specimen will not tolerate the government’s or a man’s unadulterated abuse of innocent children.
Janet Napolitano should pay 10 cents and generously tip the kids, who will be flanked by parental body guards (only a suicidal idiot would try to come between a mother and her offspring!) and, except to compliment the whole lot on the refreshing, tasty cup of lemonade, Ms. Napolitano would be well-advised to keep her deep-throat authoritarian voice silenced and her hounds on a short choke chain on August 20.