Hey, you can't sell that pickle without a permit!!
Petty, turf-conscious, by-the-book bureaucrats are shutting down "illegal" grocery providers in Los Angeles, according to this report in Reason.
"A few Los Angeles restaurants struggling to maintain footing amid the COVID-19 outbreak identified a clever way to generate revenue while still serving the community: Start selling groceries.
The city's public health department promptly shut them down. The reason? The small businesses don't have a "grocery permit."
"It's not really possible for a restaurant to become a grocery store," Dr. Barbara Ferrer, director of Los Angeles County Public Health, said in a briefing yesterday. "You cannot just decide you want to sell groceries."
So, what's one big lesson to be learned from this?
Meddlesome government does more harm than good.
We've become a culture of nay-saying rather than yay-saying by handing unelected apparatchiks overly vast powers that they wield with the rigidity and ruthlessness of a Soviet kommisar. Most of what the government does today is to restrain productivity, creativity, adaptability and innovation, often for anachronistic or invalid reasons. In a crisis, when we need to move quickly, we see that hitting the "stop" button on the government's robotic red tape dispenser is the quickest way to get results. Mountains can still be moved . . . but only when the mountain of accreted rules and regulations at the local, state and federal levels are bulldozed aside and free enterprise has a chance to breath again.
If America survives this, it will be the private sector, unshackled from government red tape, that saves our bacon. And we can come out of this situation stronger than ever before if we refuse to go back to the somnambulant "normal" and declare a continuous war on unnecessary red tape once the immediate crisis recedes.
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