Aug 3, 2012 No Comments ›› Pat Dollard
Excerpted from THE BLAZE: It has recently come to our attention that we here at the Blaze may have vastly underestimated a former member of Barrack Obama’s cabinet. It all started Sunday, when the blog SooperMexican noticed a congratulatory tweet coming from the former Obama Green Energy Czar’s account. Seems that Van Jones was a “proud papa” boasting about the success of his son’s Lemonade stand:
We here at the Blaze have consistently been in support of the lemonade stands and it’s correlation to the budding entrepreneurial spirit in this country. We applaud Young Jones for his hard work and charity and hope that the principles of the free market will provide a foundation for future success.
However, this story seemed slightly too good to be true.
In the last few years, a disheartening phenomenon has begun to occur all over the country. Kids on street-corners have been told to shut down their lemonade stands and bake sales as a function of overbearing regulation. The health, safety and environmental ordinances for local business today make it impossible for many communities to allow unlicensed sweets to be sold from cardboard boxes by children.
On July 16th 2010, the cops shut down two children selling unlicensed lemonade and brownies during a San Francisco open-air symphony. The San Francisco Police spokesman cited the strict city ordinances to justify the shutdown and noted that all SF food sellers must obtain city permits due to health concerns.
The police spokesperson quipped in a press conference, “Just because they‘re kids they shouldn’t get a free pass, you know?”
In other places around the country, like in Montgomery County, Md, not only were the stands shut own but the parents were slapped with fines of $500 a piece for letting their children have an unlicensed entrepreneurial experience. The punctuated irony is that Van Jones is a true believer in these types of health and environmental regulations. He advocates them all over the country and has even wrote a bestselling book on the topic.
Jones lives with his family in Los Angeles and are proud residents of that community. While we do not know the exact street-corner that Young Jones made his lemonade profit, it did cross our mind that he may have been in violation of a few LA ordinances, while doing it.
After a bit of Blaze research, our worst fears were confirmed. If young Jones’s entrepreneurial activity did take place in Los Angeles it would have been in direct violation of dozens of strict environmental, health and tax rules laid out by the LA Department of Public Works. Jones, the ardent advocate of government economic intervention, should pay closer attention to the regulations of his own community.
Here is a short list of the laws that young Jones may have been in violation of according to city code:
