The heavy hand of government strikes again...
This time on a budding entrepreneur in Northeast Portland, Oregon named Julie Murphy, a 7-year-old girl with a lemonade stand.
Julie first got the idea of having a stand after watching an episode of cartoon pig Olivia running one, said her mother, Maria Fife.So Julie went into action.
She put together a sign, working hard to make it just right by coloring in the letters and decorating it with a drawing of a person saying "Yummy." She made a list of supplies. Then, she got her mom to take her to a neighborhood street fair, with gallons of bottled water and packets of Kool-Aid and set up for business.
Business was good,and people were glad to help a little girl earn a little summer mad money. According to her mom, Julie was careful about making the lemonade, cleaning her hands with hand sanitizer, using a scoop for the bagged ice and keeping everything covered when it wasn't in use.
But then Big Government struck. After 20 minutes, a "lady with a clipboard" came over and asked for their license. When Fife explained they didn't have one, the woman told them to leave or face a $500 fine.
When the inspector moved off and Julie and her mom began to pack up, the peasants revolted. The people staffing the booths next to them told them to stay, insisting that the inspectors had no right to kick them out of the neighborhood gathering. They also suggested that they accept donations for the lemonade instead of charging a fixed price, and one of them even made an announcement to the crowd to support Julie's lemonade stand.
The crowd responded enthusiastically, business picked up - and then TWO government apparatchniks came back and forced them to close down. Julie started crying, while others confronted the inspectors. "It was a very big scene," Fife said.
But the stand was forced to close.
What the State wanted from little Julie Murphy was a $120 temporary restaurant license.In fact, in Oregon any lemonade stand, even if your child puts up one on your front lawn has to fork over or be closed down.
Obviously, for a start-up business on Julie Murphy's scale, a $120 fee is pretty much a deal killer.
Julie's mom says that Julie still tells her mother "it was a bad day" and complains about the inspectors shutting down her lemonade stand. But on the plus side, Julie Murphy just got a life lesson in how Big Government works, and I hope she remembers it.
And her mom? "It's gotten to the point where they need to be in all of our decisions. They don't trust us to make good choices on our own."
Yes indeed.
This reminds of something on a much bigger scale than little Julie. The "Left" complains endlessly about "offshoring" and not paying workers a "liveable wage." You see with onerous regulations like this it is impossible for a company to pay workers a liveable wage and comply with the endless regulations that a company must comply with.
ReplyDeleteIf you pay your the types of wages that the "left" expects, you cannot afford to comply with the endless regulations. If you don't compy with the endless regulations, they shut you down. As such, if a company wishes to survive these days, in many instances they have no choice but to "offshore." Yet we never hear anyone on the "left" suggest that the solution to the problem of "offshoring" is to eliminate or drastically reduce some of the endless regulations that businesses are saddled with.
As such, it seems that "leftists" are not interested in worker rights or livable wages. They actually have some thing else in mind.
Perhaps Oregon will change some their here. Perhaps some of the other merchants will lobby Oregon officials to change some of the laws here. I suspect other states have simillar laws on the books. Hopefully they will be changed as well.
This was a neighborhood get-together, or what? This is just crazy but for some reason it does not surprise me. They want control of EVERYTHING. Reminds me of some old black and white cartoon with an evil stick figure yelling "I WILL CONTROL THE WORLD".
ReplyDeleteDebbie
Right Truth
http://www.righttruth.typepad.com
i was going to say something about a sack and hair, but can't remember what it was right now.
ReplyDeletein ff essay, true leftists would refer to julie as, that little eichmann, and/or compare julie's mom to hitler.