Long ago, way back in the halcyon summertime days of 1954
America, when I was a wee lad of 8-years, my neighborhood pal Buzzy Acker and
me, with our mother’s permission of course, set up a Kool-Aid stand in front of
our modest houses on Adams Street in the city of South Bend Indiana.
We purchased packets of Kool-Aid at the grocery store for
a nickel apiece, mixed the contents with ordinary tap water and sugar, and sold
10 small paper cups of ice cold Kool-Aid per packet to thirsty neighborhood customers (mostly
other kids), and motorist passersby for a nickel each.
It was fun; it was easy; it was profitable, innocent juvenile
entrepreneurship. We weren’t doing anything wrong. No one complained to the
government about our activities. No one got sick. No permits or licenses, or health
department permission was necessary. Lots of kids did the same thing back then.
It was all part of growing up free in America.
Of course, that was before the United Statists of America
took over control of the United States of America. Today’s kids don’t have it
quite as easy as Buzzy and me had it in 1954. Today a kid setting up a Kool-Aid
stand or a homemade cupcake or cookie table is likely to run into a nasty buzz
saw of statist bureaucratic government bullshit.
In short, if you’re a kid or even an adult nowadays and
don’t have permission from the local government to run a Kool-Aid stand, a church
bake sale or the like, the statist municipal Kool-Aid, cupcake cookie monsters
are likely to shut you down, perhaps even charge you with a “crime.”
That’s what happened to little 12-year-old Chloe Sirling of
Troy, Illinois, when the Madison County Health Department shut down her Hey
Cupcake! Homemade cupcake proprietorship operation she started for helping out
local fundraisers and churches through sales of baked goods to family and
friends. When the local municipal statist cookie monsters found out about it she
was squashed for selling baked goods without a license or having a
state-certified kitchen.
The sad fact is that, today nearly 30 percent of Americans
work in jobs that require some form of federal, state or county licensure. That’s
six times the number in the 1950s. And it really has nothing to do with health
and safety. When was the last time you heard about someone getting sick from
eating a homemade cookie at a church bake sale?
It’s all about money in the municipal coffers from permit
and licensing fees and statist government control over individual’s lives. Today
one has to buy a permit to repaint their house; to put up a fence; or add a
patio to their back yard. None of that bureaucratic nonsense was necessary back
in the good old 1950’s.
This week, however, magnanimous Illinois State lawmakers unanimously
passed a law dubbed
the “cupcake bill” that will allow home kitchen operators earning less than $1,000
per month to operate freely without the intervention of local governments or
health departments.
Republicans seized on Chloe’s story after she became a
folk hero. You see, they didn’t do it because it is the right thing to do. They
did it only because a large number of their constituents made a stink about it
and they were consequently worried about their statist political hides. “Some
of this stuff seems so stupid to me, that we have these rules,” one
lawmaker sheepishly told National Public Radio.
What does a $1,000 per month limit on sales, I wonder,
have to do with health and safety, or anything else for that matter? Why does
someone earning more than $1,000 per month still need expensive permission from
the authority?
The statists, including competition hating restaurant
owners, who attempted to block the law, did succeed in amending it to provide
that it only applies to home kitchen operations where the local governing body
has adopted an ordinance authorizing the direct sale of baked goods.
So many little kids will still have to get government
permission to set up a Kool-Aid stand. They’ll still be required to look out
for the municipal Kool-Aid cupcake cookie monsters.
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