U.S. Pickle Permit Police Will be the Death of Us.

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.  

Stuck Between a Rock and Red Tape

If you want a quick look at how maddeningly hard it can be to get anything -- anything -- done on federal land, given the endless layers of "process" one must wade through, consider the case of Kimberly Appelson, 23, whose body has been wedged under a rock in the Arkansas River since July, awaiting a recovery operation knotted in red tape.

Appelson drowned after falling from a raft at Frog Rock rapids, a notoriously tricky spot not far from Buena Vista, but her body remains trapped there, months later, while retrieval options are studied by bureaucrats. From a story in The Denver Post:

"The river's managers hope to erect a temporary dam — possibly using concrete highway barriers — to divert flow away from the sieve and give divers a chance to reach Appelson.

There's plenty of red tape to go through before any work is done. The Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service would require some environmental analysis. The Army Corps of Engineers would need to approve the plan. Wildlife officials require protection for the river's brown trout. If all goes well, work would be done sometime this month."

I'm not diminishing the challenge involved in this recovery, but it doesn't seem right to have a family waiting for the return of a loved one while all the usual agencies are consulted and a pointless "process" drags on. If you can't even recover a body without such delays, what chance do you have of getting anything else done on federal lands (or waters) in a reasonably-timely way? The "process" is broken, as the story proves. Appelson is as much a captive of federal red tape as she is the boulders at Frog Rock rapids.

Cut the crap, move the rock and return this woman to her family. I don't believe retrieving the girl's body will present any threat to the frigging brown trout. Slavishness to a "process" under these circumstances isn't just inhumane -- it's insane.