The American Guesser

In communist China and Cuba, they are allowing more and more free enterprise. They ought to try it in New York City:

To 10-year-old Clementine Lee, setting up a lemonade stand at Riverside Park on a hot Saturday afternoon seemed like a fun way to make money.

Instead, she and her dad got slapped with a $50 fine.

“I was kind of nervous, and I also really felt bad because I didn’t know I was doing something against the law,” Clementine said.

Lousy bullies.

In the past Peoria, has seen quite a bit of abuse of eminent domain laws. They’ve used it to take away private property and use it to build strip malls and baseball parks. But the most recent version of the Peoria City Council hasn’t even allowed this sort of thing to even reach the proposal stage. Yet.

Not so much in Schaumberg, according to the Schaumburg Freedom Coalition:

This property is home to a Sara Lee/Market Day outlet store that has given back hundreds of thousands of dollars back to the local community over the many years of its existence. This small store shown a great deal of concern for the people of our community that not many other local businesses can match.

It is also home to Hair Clip, whose owner escaped the oppression of communist Vietnam to live and work in the greatest bastion of freedom, the United States of America. Now that the Village of Schaumburg is looking to kick these people out of their businesses we are learning that the land of the free isn’t so free after all.

When private property can be taken away simply because someone with a lot of money wants it, then none of us are really any better off than serfs.

Even though the Kelo Decision didn’t go the way that people who care about property rights wanted, I think it did open a lot of eyes. I’m sorry it didn’t happen in Schaumburg.

But I’m worried that with the economy tanking and people in a panic, the politicians and the developers will be scaring people into turing a blind eye toward this kind of eminent domain abuse. After all, there are jobs at stake. 

Feh.

 

As I said in the previous post, I’m not a fan of Ron Paul. But a lot of libertarian-minded people are, having overlooked his history — via pal and partner Lew Rockwell — of promoting soft-core Confederate Heritage ideology). So here is a link to a IPR post with lots of yummy Ron Paul clips. Have a fun and be sure to wash your hands afterward.

From Reason’s Hit & Run, a classic example of the folly of laws that make no exceptions for circumstances:

Wendy Whitaker, 29, has been on Georgia’s sex offender list for more than 12 years. Her crime? She performed oral sex on a high school classmate just after turning 17. The boy was just shy of his 16th birthday. Both were sophomores. Whitaker is now suing, claiming that given her crime, her sex offender status is cruel and unusual punishment.

[snip]

Whitaker is also involved in a second lawsuit—this one to keep her house. In 2006, she and her husband scoped out neighborhood surrounding the Harlem, Georgia home they eventually purchased to be sure they were in compliance with Georgia’s sex offender law at the time. That law prohibited offenders from living within 1,000 feet of any area where children congregate. Despite their efforts, local authorities ordered Whitaker and her husband to vacate shortly after they moved in. They had overlooked a nearby church, which was running an unadvertised daycare service.

Here’s the problem: No one ever got elected to office championing the cause of people who are convicted sex criminals. And as the article points out, it could have been worse. Had she been a 17-year-old black male getting a BJ from a consenting girl a few years younger, a 10-year sentence cold have been in the offing.