The Prospect of a Business Partnership with the State Is Overwhelming
Mr. Levinson graduated from Tufts University in 1993 where he was the recipient of the Paul Monde Prize for Entrepreneurship.
Norman Rockwell couldn’t have dreamed of a more wholesome and traditional scene than a youngster’s sidewalk lemonade stand. This American rite of passage embodies hard work, dedication, and reward. Here is the training ground for fledgling capitalists to learn about profits, risk, supply, demand, and competition. Since lemonade stands are such a cherished memory of childhood, it is fitting to consider how they may have to change under the impact of government regulation. Would Rockwell still be the artist of choice to render the local stand on canvas? Might Edvard Munch, who painted “The Scream,” be a more appropriate selection?
Once upon a time, regulation at the lemonade stand meant you had to be inside for supper by six. Intervention was when the neighborhood bully helped himself to a free serving, and health codes were limited to keeping bugs out of the pitcher.
Today, the government has encroached on every facet of our economic activities. No longer can a transaction occur between two willing parties. Every pecuniary action involves three agents: the buyer, the seller, and the ubiquitous State. Not even the lemonade hawker is free from big government’s stifling control.
Lemonade, if you do it by the book, is a serious business in Boston. Opening a stand requires permission from five different government entities. Licenses and permits for a lemonade stand cost $335. Fifty-five dollars covers the cost of a city Hawkers’ and Peddlers’ license from the Division of Standards. A mobile food permit from the Health Division runs $100, while registering a business with the City Clerk costs $30. For $15 a square foot the Department of Public Works will issue a permit to sell on public sidewalks. Furthermore, Boston requires lemonade stand operators to carry $500,000 liability insurance policies. What half-million dollar damage a lemonade stand can inflict, I cannot fathom. With the fees come the redundant forms and long lines which characterize government.
Letters Three Inches High
Cash alone does not appease the sundry departments and divisions that regulate the lemonade industry. Along with the fees are countless rules which aim to protect the public’s welfare. However, in practice, most of them are burdensome, arbitrary, and detrimental to the common good.
The old-fashioned lemonade stand must comply with dozens of ordinances. For example, 105 CMR 590-004(A)5 requires sugar to be in its original package or a container identifying it by common name and 590.009 grants the Board of Health jurisdiction over the length of employees’ fingernails. If the lemonade is made in a residential kitchen, only immediate family members residing in the household may prepare it for retail sale (590.028F), and washing machines and dryers located in the kitchen may not be in operation while the lemons are squeezed (590.028G(15)). At least once a day, food pushcarts must report to a fixed food establishment (such as a restaurant) for supplies, cleaning, and servicing (590.029(1)).
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts frowns upon the ramshackle wooden stands set upon the lawn that Rockwell would paint. 590.029J(q)a requires serving area surfaces to be of a “smooth, nonabsorbent material such as concrete or machine-laid asphalt . . . .” All mobile food units must also display the owner’s name in letters not smaller than three inches on the left and right sides.
It isn’t only the young who are overwhelmed by the prospect of a business partnership with the State. Plenty of enterprising individuals are too daunted by the paperwork and confiscatory nature of government to open the adult version of a lemonade stand. Government policies thwart businesses even before they start. The most persistent who do open shop are faced with government’s taxing demands on their time and wallet.
We all suffer from the State’s undue interest in even our most innocuous and pedestrian entrepreneurial ventures. It is the lemonade stand owner and his kind, the productive individuals of society, who bankroll the bureaucracy. In a painful irony, the productive segment of society pays for a legion of government employees who dedicate their lives to impeding the work of lemonade salesmen everywhere. No one benefits from notarized signatures and forms in triplicate and junior assistants to the pro tem co-director of Public Works licensing. In sum, the State doesn’t make lemonade.
