I Tried to Open a Lemonade Stand

By John Stossel

Want to open a business in America? It isn't easy.
In Midway, Ga., a 14-year-old girl and her 10-year-old sister sold lemonade from their front yard. Two police officers bought some. But the next day, different officers ordered them to close their stand.

Their father went to city hall to try to find out why. The clerk laughed and said she didn't know. Eventually, Police Chief Kelly Morningstar explained, "We were not aware of how the lemonade was made, who made the lemonade and of what the lemonade was made with."
Give me a break. If she doesn't know, so what? But kids trying their first experiment with entrepreneurship are being shut down all over America. Officials in Hazelwood, Ill., ordered little girls to stop selling Girl Scout cookies.
It made me want to try to jump through the legal hoops required to open a simple lemonade stand in New York City. Here's some of what one has to do:
-- Register as sole proprietor with the County Clerk's Office (must be done in person)
-- Apply to the IRS for an Employer Identification Number.
-- Complete 15-hr Food Protection Course!
-- After the course, register for an exam that takes 1 hour. You must score 70 percent to pass. (Sample question: "What toxins are associated with the puffer fish?") If you pass, allow three to five weeks for delivery of Food Protection Certificate.
-- Register for sales tax Certificate of Authority
-- Apply for a Temporary Food Service Establishment Permit. Must bring copies of the previous documents and completed forms to the Consumer Affairs Licensing Center.
Then, at least 21 days before opening your establishment, you must
arrange for an inspection with the Health Department's Bureau of Food Safety and Community Sanitation. It takes about three weeks to get your appointment. If you pass, you can set up a business once you:
-- Buy a portable fire extinguisher from a company certified by the New York Fire Department and set up a contract for waste disposal.
-- We couldn't finish the process. Had we been able to schedule our health inspection and open my stand legally, it would have taken us 65 days.
I sold lemonade anyway. I looked dumb hawking it with my giant fire extinguisher on the table.
Tourists told me they couldn't believe that I had to get "all those permits." A Pakistani man said: "That's crazy! You should move to Pakistan!"
But I don't want to move to Pakistan.
Politicians say, "We support entrepreneurs," but the bureaucrats make it hard. The Feds alone add 80,000 pages of new rules every year. Local governments add more. There are so many incomprehensible rules that even the bureaucrats can't tell you what's legal. In the name of public safety, politicians strangle opportunity.

Copyright 2012, Creators Syndicate Inc.

Thar She Blows

Update: On this topic, see this ZeroHedge post and READ THE COMMENTS. Stuff like:

July is going to be worse. People were actually shopping in June.
I talked to a few people in Target looking at school supplies. They were writing down what they have. The women all said they are going to wait until school starts to buy the supplies because they know Target will put everything 50% off and then drop stuff to 75% a week later.
Nothing moved in summer seasonal until it was at least 50% off.
Reality is asserting itself. People don't have enough money to pay for the inflated prices of everything. Historical 20% profit margins will be coming back to retail. The consumer will no longer pay $20 for an item that was bought by the retailer for $7.
The problem is the immense overhead of big retail will destroy it with margins like that. Deflation is the only outcome when the population can't afford anything. At least when the free market allows it. Supply and demand says if nobody buys at price X, you must lower it until somebody does.
Mon, 07/16/2012 - 10:12 | 2620056 Abiotic Oil

Was in a local store this weekend. Huge summer clothing clearance sale. Talked to an employee who has been at the same store for 20 years and he said he has never seen so much summer clothing inventory left over or marked down as much as it was. It was finally moving at well over 50% off retail.

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Mon, 07/16/2012 - 10:30 | 2620120 Arnold Ziffel

July sales are dismal. Every store is nearly empty even with 60% discounts AND cash back rewards. I have never seen it so bad

End update.

I believe I mentioned regarding the last employment report that we appeared to be in a consumer recession, but not a manufacturing recession.

This morning's retail report for June confirms that belief. If you look at Table 2, retail sales in the second quarter were down 0.2% from Q1 retail sales. There's a clear drop off in the YoYs:

• 6 month YTD = +6.4%.
• May = +5.1%.
• June = +3.8%.

For June compared to May, it's -0.5%. May was negative in comparison to April, but the early Easter could have accounted somewhat for that. Adjusted for inflation, the YoYs are weaker than cited above. This graph only goes through May, because we don't have price indices for June yet:

In the US the rule of thumb is that real retail sales need to advance about 1% over the rate of population expansion. We seem to have fallen below that line in the last quarter.

The short term data is beginning to develop consistencies. The spike in May revolving credit was due to strapped consumers. The spike in female head of households out of work is largely due to slack retail, and one reinforces the other. What I really don't like is that auto advertising seems to be shifting to the credit downside. This could accelerate the retail downturn over Q3.

Now factor the recent sharp drops in some of the manufacturing surveys into the consumer-side picture (for example, the last two months of Chicago PMI abruptly changed trend to came in significantly below the 10 year and 40 year means and medians), and a vision of epic beauty and promise materializes in your mind's eye - if you are a Romney campaign worker, that is. If you are a Romney policy wonk hoping for a job in the Romney administration next year, this is a bad development.

Empire State Manufacturing came out this morning, and although it increased, new orders fell significantly, and the headline level is about where it was at the beginning of the last recession.

One of my brothers called me this weekend to report on the gun show index, and he told me flatly that it looked like a depression.

And You thought Harper was Bad ?

Obama Robs Elderly to Pay Young

by Nathan Harden on July 18, 2012

Robin Hood robbed the rich to pay the poor; now Uncle Sam is robbing the old to pay the young — raiding pension funds to keep student-loan rates artificially low.

President Obama’s much-touted plan to put a one-year freeze on student interest rates was signed into law with great fanfare this month. But the bill’s supporters hadn’t said where the money to subsidize the lower rates would come from.
Columnist Daniel Indiviglio of Reuters dug up the details this week, calling the bill financial “hocus-pocus.” The student-loan scheme was buried in a transportation bill. In it, the government raided its pension-guarantee fund to the tune of $6 billion — although the fund is already running a deficit of $26 billion.
The student-loan bill puts the pension system in jeopardy. To cover future payouts, pension contributions will need to rise by as much as $50 billion a year. The fund’s already broke; now, thanks to this reckless bill, it’s one step closer to total collapse.
Plus, the bill lowers accounting standards for pension funds, letting them contribute less money than before while forecasting the same future return. That is, the president and Congress are pretending that a system that’s already broke will magically prosper in the future with even less direct investment.
The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp is designed to insure private retirement plans. Millions of present and future retirees depend on it. Putting it at risk is simply irresponsible…
Read the full article in the New York Post.

Kindergarten Graduation In Gaza

One might expect that a graduation ceremony from kindergarten would be a cheerful event, if a school bothered to put one on at all. Not so in Gaza, apparently. A teacher at the school pictured below said:

In every year’s kindergarten graduation ceremonies we focus on the children to represent the role of struggling and resistance in the way of Allah, in order to establish this path, and grow up to love the resistance, and for it to have a prominent role in their lives to serve the cause of Palestine and Holy Jihad, as well as to make them leaders and fighters to defend the holy soil of Palestine.

The kids get into the spirit of the occasion:

One child, Hamza, wearing the uniform of the Al Quds Brigades of Islamic Jihad and carrying a wooden weapon, said “I love the resistance and the martyrs and Palestine, and I want to blow up the most Zionists in a process of martyrdom and kill them.”

Here are some photos from the event.

What kindergarten event would be complete without coffins?

Here a boy dressed as an Israeli soldier pretends to torture a Palestinian:

There are lots more photos at this jihadist web site. These kids appear to have jailed some Israelis:

Here you can see the kids’ parents enjoying the event:

The girls carry weapons, too:

The words “cycle of violence” are often used in connection with the Middle East, usually in a way that is inapt. Here, however, I think we are indeed seeing the beginning of another cycle.

I Laughed So Hard

This really belongs on Small Dead Animals, but you have to read it here for now:

Not content with destroying their energy infrastructure, the Greens in Germany banned the primary agricultural rodent poison in 2008 due to environmental impacts.

The results have been alternately tragic and hilarious:

Farmers in Thuringia and Saxony-Anhalt are complaining that millions of field mice are devastating their food crops, including corn, barley and winter wheat. "They are eating everything," said Matthias Krieg, who manages an agricultural firm near the town of Zeitz in Saxony-Anhalt. "Not even the sugar beets are safe."...

Farmers already noticed an increase in the field mouse population in 2011 and began to take counter measures. According to Reinhard Kopp, a spokesman for the Thuringian Farmers' Association, agriculturalists set up hundreds of perches in their fields to lure birds of prey to kill the mice. But the operation was only moderately successful. "The birds got so fat from eating all the mice that they almost couldn't fly any more," Kopp said. "But they still couldn't keep up."
...
Instead, agriculturalists want drastic action. They have requested permission to deploy a rat poison called Ratron. Farmers in Germany have been banned from using the poison on large areas since 2008. Ironically, it was the indiscriminate use of Ratron by farmers in Saxony-Anhalt that led the agency to ban it in the first place, after the poison killed wild geese and endangered European hamsters.

The pensioners who can't afford to keep their lights on can now snicker at the farmers' suffering. A lot of those receiving the fat solar subsidies are farmers. Of course it won't be fun much longer as food prices rise!

I concede that I am not a nice person for laughing so hard, but what did everyone expect?

Two hard winters partly shielded the farmers from the results of the rodent poison ban, but this last winter was milder, so the inevitable happened. What they need is cats. Tens of thousands of them. But then the cats would eat the wild birds (think about the US campaign to ban outdoor cats).

Also the cats might end the mouse plague, and then the raptors would have to eat kittens. This would cause severe suffering in Germany, where laws protect household rodents from the cruelty of their human roommates.

If they do authorize the use of poison, then those fat raptors are going to be fat corpses, because they'll be eating poisoned rodents. Farmers have a lot of clout in Germany, so I presume they'll win this battle, but not before losing a good portion of this year's crop.

// posted by MaxedOutMama @ 7/11/2012 07:27:00 AM

What is Sharia, where does it come from, and why does it matter so much?

By Professor Dr. Johannes Jansen

Brussels, ICLA, July 9, 2012

The Islamic Sharia is a system of law. It is a collection of prohibitions, admonitions and commands about human behavior. The Sharia is not an internal matter that only concerns Islam and Muslims. The Sharia includes a large number of provisions about people who are not Muslims. These rules are usually prohibitions that carry severe penalties if violated. These provisions of the Sharia make life unsafe and uncertain for someone who lives under Sharia law and who is not a Muslim.

Under Sharia law, someone who is not a Muslim possesses no inalienable rights. If I am wrong here, I will be relieved, and happy to stand corrected and receive your e-mails pointing out why I am wrong. But if I am right, a prisoner in Guantanamo Bay possesses more rights than a Jew or a Christian who lives under Sharia law.

Unlike the legal systems of most modern nation states, Sharia law is not subject to democratic supervision. Like international law and rabbinic law, Sharia law is an academic affair: experts discuss and debate the rules until they reach an agreement. Sharia law does not know a parliament or a government that acts as legislator, but the rules of the Sharia come into being by being agreed upon by the experts, that is, the Islamic religious leaders, the professional Muslims, the Ulama, Ayatollahs, or whatever these dignitaries are called.

Like me, most of you will be only superficially familiar with international law. The pretensions of international law have never been put to the test of a free and democratic vote. It was, to say the least, interesting to note how often the accusers of Geert Wilders in 2010 and 2011 appealed to what they regarded as generally accepted international law in order to silence Geert Wilders. As international law demonstrates, communities of academic specialists, in their isolation, have a tendency to develop a degree of pedantry that an elected lawgiver could never afford. Up to a point, this is exactly what has happened to the Sharia.

Religions are not democratic even if they sometimes may preach or tolerate democracy. Hence, the way in which the rules of Islamic law come into being is undemocratic. This implies that allowing the Sharia, or a part of it, to be the law of the land in a Western nation will diminish the democratic character of that nation. It means giving away legislative power to unelected self-appointed men, who are unknown and anonymous, who operate from far-away mosques in Pakistan or Afghanistan. In a democracy, this is not the ideal arrangement. One may have legitimate religious reasons to nevertheless prefer such an arrangement, but it entails something worse than taxation without representation; it entails legislation without representation.

Western policymakers do not take Sharia law too seriously because it is an academic and religious affair, a system of law that springs not from the power of a state but from the minds of religious scholars. In the Muslim world, to the contrary, the authority of the Sharia is overwhelming. The colossal prestige of the Sharia in the world of Islam is easy to explain: Islamic theology identifies Sharia law with the will of God; and Sharia specialists are the religious leaders of the Islamic community. No government in the Muslim world can afford to alienate these specialists of religious law if it wants to remain in power.

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