Where has freedom gone?

When I was a wee lad every summer my mother would let me make big batches of Kool-Aid and set up a folding card table stand in front of our house to sell it to the neighborhood kids for a nickel a cup. Lots of kids were doing that for fun and profit in the summertime back in the 1950’s. It seems that there was more individual freedom then.

Now I wonder where freedom has gone.

That innocent childhood entrepreneurial activity would most likely be considered illegal today unless the kid got permission in advance from the government. That’s right. A kid can’t set up a front yard Kool-Aid stand in America today without a government permit. The government today treats kiddie Kool-Aid stands the same way as it does nuclear power plants. They got to get a permit.

Two little girls in Texas found that out the hard way last week when their mom let them set up a lemonade stand in their yard only to be busted by the cops and shut down for the “crime” of not having a $150 “Peddler’s Permit.” They criminally conspired to raise the sum of $100 by selling lemonade to neighborhood kids so they could take their dad to Splash Kingdom for father’s day.

You can’t do that in Texas today without prior permission from the town statists. It’s illegal. After they were busted the town authorities magnanimously agreed to waive the $150 fee for a “Peddler’s Permit,” but they then discovered that permission was also necessary from the local health department.

You see, Texas law prohibits the sale of any food items that could spoil without proper temperature control so the statists also require that a health inspection be conducted before a permit is granted.

Have you ever heard of a kid getting food poisoning from a neighborhood kiddie Kool-Aid or lemonade stand during the entire history of civilization? Neither have I, but statists in the USA today don’t want anything done without a permit and the costly fees that go with it.

 "We have to follow by the state health guidelines. They have to have a permit if they're going to do the lemonade stands," insisted the town’s chief of police who claims he was just following the law. I wonder what happened to the discretion cops used to have back in the good old days.

Nothing apparently is discretionary these days. In 2011 a group of kids who set up a lemonade stand outside the Congressional Country Club in Montgomery County, Maryland, were fined $500 for not having a vendor's permit.

Where has freedom gone?