Just Let Them Sell Bacondogs!
Great Reason.tv piece. It may very well be that it’s stupid for bacondogs to be illegal, but my beef is that Los Angeles City forces vendors to shell-out $26,000 for a hotdog cart if they want to sell the highly-demanded bacondogs. Question: if the cops patrol the streets enough to throw away vendors’ carts without due process, why can’t they just write tickets for violations?
A friend of mine, who is wedded to the idea that Democrats are the poor man’s champions, often asks me how limited government can ever help the poor. Elizabeth Palacios is my answer. Her bacondog sales earned her a car and house. The city has mandated that she purchase a hotdog cart 5 times as expensive as the one she has now. She spent 45 days in the cooler because she couldn’t. Keep seeling those dogs, sister.
May 20th, 2008 at 8:01 pm
That sucks! But, I’ve known plenty of people who have gotten sick from street food, especially in places like Mexico where they don’t have health regulations. What do you think the solution is? Shouldn’t we have regulations that ensure that food is safe? Don’t you think that consumers would be much more wary of buying informal food like this if they didn’t have some kind of assurance that they aren’t going to wind up ill?
That said, I think that fining and jailing people for violations like this is stupid, and I take issue with our punitive system of enforcement. It probably costs the Health Department as much to prosecute her as it would to just buy her a nicer cart, or arrange for a loan for her to help her buy it. What I would like to see is more microloans being given to disadvantaged women that own their own businesses so that they can be encouraged to grow. This is clearly someone who wants to abide by the rules, but is below the threshold of being able to afford to do so. We shouldn’t be punishing people like this; we should be enabling them to succeed. I know that’s terribly liberal, but that’s what I think!