I hereby confer on the organizers and participants in Lemonade Freedom Day the Leviathan Ankle-Biter Award, to be enjoyed by them with all the rights and privileges pertaining thereto.

The big event is on August 20.  The web site is at lemonadefreedom.com.   You can sign up on facebook

I must confess I’ve ridden past a couple of lemonade stands this summer without stopping, but I will be sure to correct that error on August 20 or any other day when there is an opportunity.

 
View larger map

Update:  Here is a Google Map provided by the Freedom Center of Missouri.  The Red markers indicate towns where kid-run concession stands have been shut down.   The Green ones are towns that allow kid-run concession stands without requiring a permit.   The Yellow ones are places that require kids to get at least one city permit.

A Leviathan-Anklebiter award is hereby awarded to Monique Lawless for her attempt to stop lawlessness.  (H/T James Taranto.)   As usual, the authorities prefer that people not take such dangerous actions, but we should at least give the police chief credit for admiring her courage.   Sometimes Leviathan is a lot surlier than that when people perform courageous acts on their own initiative.  The full story is here.

I hope this action doesn’t put her job as a “safety” specialist in danger.

Monique Lawless had nothing personal at stake when she saw three men leaving a Walmart store in Alvin with three cases of beer they didn’t pay for. She was a customer, not an employee, of the store.

Yet Lawless, who stands just under 5 feet tall and weighs 125 pounds, took off in pursuit of the three much larger men.

“I’m just sick of the lawlessness,” the 42-year-old Alvin woman said. “They knew their chances of getting caught were slim to none. Those kids would have gotten away with it, celebrated their theft and probably continue to do it.”

The three alleged thieves were arrested — at another Walmart store in Pearland near Texas 288 — after an hourlong chase. But Lawless’ efforts to stop them came at a price: a scratched face, broken lip and scrapes and bruises to her legs.

Lawless, an engineering safety specialist at Boeing…

Q.  And what does the photo of the Alabama State Capitol have to do with this?   A.  1) It was handy.  2)  The State of Alabama didn’t like it when Nate Shaw took the protection of his own property into his own hands, and locked him up for over a decade.

Q.  Or the two cases really analogous?   A.  Yes, they are, but how good an analogy we have here, I don’t really know.  Doesn’t matter all that much.  Ms. Lawless gets a Leviathan Anklebiter award.

Late edit:  More photos here at the UK Daily Mail Online, including some taken by CCTV security cameras.

• Bush-1 gave us Bill Clinton
• Bush-2 gave us Barak Obama
• We don’t want to find out how this pattern plays out

And on a related topic, it’s bad enough that libertarians are socialists’ best friends.   But why do TownHall conservatives have to be 2nd best?   I wish they’d be satisfied with 3rd or 4th.   In the past few days there has been a lot of blather among them about Congressman Tim Whatever and this-or-that presidential candidate.   But there has been not a word  about Tom Coburn’s efforts to eliminate the ethanol tax credit.    An important key to bringing down Leviathan is in the fight between Coburn and Norquist.  But they are letting it go unremarked.    (Coburn gets a Leviathan Ankle-Biter award.  Norquist does not.)

I, the undersigned, hereby declare that I have taken my milk that comes from cows I own via private contract under the protection of the KY constitution (articles 1,2,4,6,10,16,26), and if the county health department would like to speak with me about this matter, I can be reached at the number given below.

I learned about this from Jerry Salyer at Front Porch Republic, in an article titled, “The War on Raw Milk.”  It’s good reading.   My own comment in response:

Statism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere may make a consequential personal choice.

A corollary definition: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere may trust his neighbor more than the state.

When I was growing up we often bought unpasteurized milk from local farmers precisely because it was unpasteurized. This became more difficult already in the 1960s, with the widespread use of bulk tanks and tighter inspections for Grade A milk, but we did it anyway. I’d sometimes be the one to walk over to a nearby dairy farmer’s milk room and dip some out of the bulk tank into a pail I had brought along. This was not exactly legal, but we had instructions on how to do it without risking any problems with the milk inspections. Such problems could incur considerable cost for the farmer.

Laws against the sale or purchase of unpasteurized milk do have one positive effect, though. They teach impressionable young minds that the regulatory state is more often stupid than not. They act as a preventative against unwarranted respect for government.

 

The inspiration is this WSJ lead article from May 27:

Justices Uphold Immigrant Law : States Can Shut Firms That Hire Illegal Workers

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce called my attention to the ankle-biter part.  It doesn’t like this decision:

“The growing patchwork of state and local immigration laws is a serious obstacle to doing business across state lines,” said Robin Conrad, director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s legal arm, which challenged the Arizona law. She called on Congress to outlaw “employment-related state immigration laws” like Arizona’s, as part of a broader immigration overhaul.

A patchwork of state and local laws makes it hard for a single company to dominate its niche from coast to coast.   If laws are uniform nation-wide, a dominant company needs to deal with only one set of regulations, and can then use economies of scale to run the smaller ones out of its business.   It can hire lobbyists to schmooze the regulators in Washington.   The biggest, most efficient lobbyist organization wins.

But if laws are not uniform, then there are niches for the smaller companies who can deal with local regulations.

In a patchwork of local laws and regulations, it’s hard for the winner to take all.   And  it’s harder for the U.S. government regulators to coopt and intimidate the patchwork of small competitors who can survive in that environment.

True, there is some loss of economic efficiency under such a patchwork, but there is also corresponding loss of efficiency of government control.    Leviathan doesn’t like that.

So a Leviathan Ankle-Biter Award goes to the United States Supreme Court.

I hope to soon make a similar award to those members of Congress who will resist the big corporate lobbyists who will argue for uniformity.

The party previously assuaged voter concerns by offering the public a share of the spoils—at one point doling out free color televisions—and promised to offer similar freebies again. But the TVs were perhaps a mistake: Voters took them, promptly saw news reports of what their rulers were up to and threw them out of power. Now the All India Anna-DMK (a splinter party founded in the 1970s) will rule.

This is from an article by Ruchir Sharma in the Tuesday issue of the Wall Street Journal.   Headline:  “Greater Expectations in India.”   Pull-out quote:  “The powerful national parties do badly in local elections.  Good.”

In our country we need more people who will take the tax credits for new energy-saving appliances, and vote out the politicians who voted for those credits.   (Energy-saving appliances are good, but tax credits for them are not.)   We need people who take the corporate welfare and vote out the politicians who enacted it.

Leviathan hates that.   Note how it treated Clarence Thomas.  They thought that when he accepted the benefits from affirmative-action programs, that he should have become subservient to the programs.   He didn’t.   Leviathan is still upset about it.

He wrote an article at Front Porch Republic in which he gently resists the the Lightning Monitor Priestess who will not allow kids to play ball under a clear sky when her oracle says there is lightning in the area.

It strikes me as bizarre how demure and passive this crowd is and these coaches are in accepting the judgment passed upon us all from a little black box. What a trifling thing it is to control man! How easily we believe in fairy tales when they come cloaked in the black box of authority and superior knowledge. And the digital readout is only the latest version of the king’s sword. In contrast to the sunny sky, my inner weather darkens and I think that here are people not yet ready to confront and resist the stifling and deadly black boxes of arbitrary authority pronouncing their judgments from Topeka or Washington D.C.

“One thing I’d like to point out is that the system worked,” Napolitano said. The passengers and crew of the flight took appropriate action. –URL

Note how this contrasts with the snide remarks they made about the heroics on Flight 93, or the tut-tutting they emit when someone takes matters into her own hands and tackles an armed robber, or their attitude toward concealed carry.

If this is a permanent change, it’s a welcome one. In any case, I presume Janet Napolitano would join me in honoring the passengers and crew with a Leviathan Ankle-Biter award.

Residents have expressed concern over seeing coyotes on the south side of Marshall, but City Manager Tom Tarkiewicz cautioned against worry because the animals are afraid of people. No injuries have been reported, and he said the city is not attempting to trap or control them.

We need more of that — more of political entities not trying to control everything in sight. For his good example, the Marshall City Manager gets a Leviathan Ankle-Biter Award.

Battle Creek Enquirer url here.

I now see there’s a new article in which he tells about being interviewed by CNN:

They smiled and smiled while filming me, but villainy lurked in their hearts.