Lemonade Freedom Day August 20

When I was a kid we set up a lemonade stand out front to make a few coins from the other kids in the neighborhood (or the passing adult who decided to humor us and support our efforts).  Good fun and no harm done.

I still see them in my neighborhood from time to time, and there's nothing wrong with a little elementary school-age entrepreneurism.

Today we're seeing stories alarmingly frequently about local cops or other authorities shutting down some kid's stand because they haven't paid the city hundreds of dollars in permits and had their manufacturing process inspected by city drones.  Someone has decided to do something about that:

Kids have been setting up lemonade stands for as long as there has been lemonade. But in recent years, regulators have started shutting them down. Robert Fernandes, a father of two, has had enough. That’s why he has declared August 20, 2011 to be Lemonade Freedom Day.

Fernandes is encouraging kids and parents to set up lemonade stands that day without going through the permits, inspections, and fees that many towns require. For more information, visit LemonadeFreedom.org. There is also a Lemonade Freedom Day Facebook event page here.

Fernandes also links to a list of news stories about lemonade stand shutdowns. The list is disturbingly long.

Mark Steyn adds this:

Iain Murray wrote yesterday about the spate of lemonade-stand crackdowns by this once great republic’s depraved regulatory class. This is not a small thing. A land in which a child requires hundreds of dollars of permits to sell homemade lemonade in his front yard is, in a profound sense, no longer free: It is exactly the kind of micro-regulatory tyranny of which Tocqueville warned two centuries ago.

Support your local lemonade stand! If you have young kids, set one up and dare the city drones to make an issue of it. Isn't this sort of how the Tea Party got started?