Lessons from the Lemonade Stand

The lemonade wars have been going on for a while now, with  Radley Balko being a critical aggregator when there were no puppycides to confront.  The “wars” involve the shuttering of the iconic children’s lemonade stands by police and government agents for failure to comply with local ordinances. 

My contrast with puppycides isn’t accidental or gratuitous; it’s offered for context.  The needless killing of dogs by police in the course of performing other duties, sometimes nothing more than a simple inquiry or mistaken address, is jarringly, shockingly horrible.  Yet not so horrible as the killing of a person. The closing of lemonade stands falls further down the horrible scale that the murder of happy, playful puppies.

Yesterday was Lemonade Freedom Day.  Sure hope you didn’t miss it, since many don’t follow David Fernandes’ blog, Selling Lemonade is Not a Crime.  Note that the title is very similar to  Carlos Miller’s Photography is Not a Crime,  While photogs have been frequently arrested, beaten or prosecuted, no lemonade sellers have suffered the same fate, except for  three adults who set up a stand on the Mall in Washington in order to get themselves arrested. They succeeded in their quest only to complain about it.

An editorial in the  Press Democrat tries to lay out the political agendas.



On Saturday, lovers of freedom — in stark contrast to those liberal baddies who want to put a full nanny-state into place — are being encouraged by Robert Fernandes to set up or patronize a lemonade stand in solidarity with the countless youngsters across the country who have had their little businesses crushed by the bureaucrats of their local governments.


Bloggers and tweeters who romanticize the lemonade stand as a symbol of American entrepreneurism have taken up Fernandes’ cause and see Lemonade Freedom Day as an opportunity to raise a defiant glass to American Dream-killing, big-government regulators who demand that community residents and businesses — gasp! — comply with local laws.


The evil bureaucrats couldn’t possibly have good reasons for shutting down a lemonade stand, could they?

Since Esther Cepeda, the author of the article, has a point to make, she engages in the time honored strawman fallacy (that is quickly becoming the norm amongst blawgers to manipulate the lay reader who doesn’t realize how logic works) and characterizes the pro-lemonade agenda as an absurd abstraction, which she then proceeds to beat to a pulp.

First, there is neighborhood food festival, where real food service vendors who have paid for the privilege of selling their stuff on the street, including an exclusivity clause the precludes competition within two blocks, are forced to compete with the 9-year-old girl’s lemonade stand.


Is it fair to uphold legal contracts with vendors or merely heartless to bust innocent young entrepreneurs?

Upholding legal contracts is certainly a good thing. Then there is the safety issue:



Scroll through lists of kid food-stand closures and you’ll find that many of them cite health codes that don’t allow food to be prepared in areas where there is no on-site hand-washing or that require proof that safety precautions were taken during food preparation.


While you might be perfectly willing to take your chances as a consumer of home-prepared snacks — even most public schools no longer allow homemade, non-pre-packaged food to be distributed to students on special occasions such as birthdays — all it takes is one outbreak of food poisoning to result in a lawsuit against a village or town for not properly ensuring that health codes were enforced.


If this sounds stupid to you, don’t blame long-standing community ordinances. Blame our litigation-crazed society. We live in a country whose courts are brimming with lawsuits over setbacks that years ago would have just been chalked up to the mishaps of a life well lived.

I’m unaware of an outbreak of e-coli stemming from a lemonade stand, though it’s not really that hard to imagine it happening, knowing kids and hygiene.  Has anyone sued, successfully, any government for failure to shut down a lemonade stand?  People keep saying we have a litigation-crazed society, and the courts are brimming with lawsuits, but Cepeda can’t find a single example to back up her hysteria.

It seems to me that anyone purchasing a cup of lemonade from a kid’s stand assumes the risk for the  pollywog swimming in it (extra flavor and protein?).  We do the same when we eat dinner at a neighbor’s house, as (truth be told) we really can’t speak to their hygiene habits.  Then again, we usually don’t have to pay a quarter, though sometimes we have to bring desert.

Or perhaps a bunch of adults with their own agendas are projecting a ton of baggage on a kid’s right of passage, or way to kill an hour, or opportunity to make a couple of bucks to buy the new Feminist Lawprof Barbie.  Among the many Latin maxims that guided the law around matters that didn’t fit well within principles intended for more serious matters was


De minimis non curat lex 

The law doesn’t bother with trifles.

Some people are political animals, inclined to turn over every rock to find some broader political meaning in every aspect of human conduct.  Sometimes, if you stare to intently and think until your head hurts, you find what you are searching for even though its really so inconsequential as to reduce your agenda to a joke.  No puppies were killed.  No photographers were beaten.  It’s just some kid with a pitcher of lemonade hoping that someone will give them a quarter for a cup.

To borrow the mantra used to justify so many absurdities in the quest for the perfect world, where no one is ever hurt, annoyed, embarrassed, or responsible, and we have a rule (or a dozen) controlling every aspect of human conduct no matter how trivial, personal or trifling, there are some matters that are so fundamentally inconsequential that even the grocery clerks who deign to run our lives can’t be bothered.  Let’s do it for the children.