It may not be Earth-shattering news — like the crisis in Georgia or the upcoming presidential conventions where Tweedle-John and Tweedle-Barrack will be nominated so they can pretend to disagree about how best to convert our Republic into an international socialist empire — but a local story coming out of the small city of Clayton, California, just got this writer’s hackles up.

The story, which was picked up by ABC News, is about two girls, Katie and Sabrina Lewis, whose family had a very productive vegetable garden — so productive, in fact, that they had been giving much of it away to family and friends. Katie, being very enterprising (as many 11-year-olds are) asked her Dad, Mike Lewis, if she could try selling the homegrown watermelons for a dollar apiece, lemonade-stand style. As Mr. Lewis told reporters: “I thought, ‘No one’s going to buy melons,’ ” But not wanting to discourage Katie’s entrepreneurship, told her to “go ahead.”

Much to Lewis’s surprise, Katie, with help from her three-year-old sister, Sabrina, sold all of her melons within two hours! Working only 20 or so weekends out of the year, the two girls brought in about $10 to $20 a week, also selling zucchini and eggplant.

“I take it and once I've got about $20 to $30, I'll bring it to the bank and put it in my bank account for college,” Katie told ABCNews.com.

But Katie and Sabrina were soon to get an early start on their college economics and learn about that nemesis of all businesspeople — the government bureaucrat. Last April, after two residents (a couple of busybodies, if you ask me!) called to ask if the girls’ vegetable stand was "legal," Clayton Mayor Gregory Manning decided to look into the matter. Perhaps, in this small city of only 11,000 people, there is no real crime to otherwise engage local law enforcement (such as, perhaps, apprehending illegal immigrants, who often work in jobs connected with harvesting produce), but in June a police officer was sent to the stand to tell the Lewis family that the girls were violating zoning regulations by operating a “commercial activity” in a residential area!

The mayor also said the stand violated health regulations, which state that food can't be sold without a permit. (It’s amazing our ancestors survived without state health regulators to look out for what they ate.)

When Mr. Lewis tried to defend his daughters’ project, comparing it to a lemonade stand, Mayor Manning said lemonade stands also are illegal in Clayton! (He admitted, however, that the authorities usually ignore lemonade stands, because they don’t last more than a day or two.)

As is typical of government bureaucrats, Manning claimed to be representing the residents' “best interests.”

“It's not like we’re the Gestapo going out and closing down fruit stands,” he said.

I’m so glad the mayor used the "G" word  — so I didn’t have to!

Yes, one could say this is also an excellent civics lesson for the girls, teaching them that all good citizens must obey the law. And that would be a point well taken. But if we want to teach our children to have respect for the law, the law must be both sensible and enforced with at least a smidgen of common sense. Otherwise, we run the risk of our citizens (both young and old) coming to the same conclusion as Charles Dickens’ character, Mr. Bumble, in Oliver Twist:

“If the law supposes that,” said Mr. Bumble, squeezing his hat emphatically in both hands, “the law is a ass- a idiot….”

By their allegedly non-Gestapo-like actions, the city fathers of Clayton have sent a message to their children: “Don’t emulate your parents and grandparents and try to earn a few dollars on your own in your spare time.”

Doesn’t the idea of a couple of girls operating a vegetable stand remind you of a scene from a Hallmark Channel movie set in small-town America in the 1930s?

But those were unenlightened times. Setting up a lemonade stand or vegetable stand must be too old-fashioned for a modern city in the San Francisco Bay area in 2008. Clayton is an affluent community, with a median family income of $107,448. Perish the thought of kids actually earning money themselves in this day and age! Next thing you know, they’ll be allowing kids to earn their spending money by picking up empty, germy, disgusting soda bottles and returning them to the store to get 2 cents deposit on each one, as I did back in the 1950s.

In all likelihood, the two residents who inquired about the legality of this threatening enterprise being operated in their neighborhood would prefer that parents simply dole out allowances of $20 a week (or more) to young girls, so they can buy Hannah Montana junk to their heart’s desire. And to think these girls actually were saving for college.

One wonders what the late R.C. Hoiles, one-time publisher of the Santa Ana (now Orange County) Register, would have said about this episode. The sometimes cantankerous, but always candid, libertarian/conservative newspaper man would undoubtedly have been outraged by this assault on youthful entrepreneurship, not to mention free enterprise. An article in Time magazine for August 30, 1948, said of Hoiles:

"R.C." is against unions (the Hoiles papers are all open shop), majority rule (“The majority can’t give my consent to anything”), progressive, income taxes (“nothing but socialism”), public education (“a house of prostitution is voluntary, grade school is not”) and aid to Europe (“Let ’em go to [heck]”). He considers both Herbert Hoover and Earl Warren too leftwing. Two things Publisher Hoiles is in favor of: child labor for the average child (“Give him a pick & shovel and let him get started”) and the black market. One touch of liberalism in the Hoiles record: during the war, he campaigned to give U.S. Japanese a fair break.

Just for the record, while I disagree with Hoiles’s now-outmoded views on child labor, the idea of children earning their own money to go to college has much to be said for it.

I have a feeling that old “R.C.” (he died in 1970 at the age of 92) would have penned an editorial that would have hit the Clayton city fathers right between their eyes! He might have written:

Depriving a couple of young girls of an opportunity to get started on their careers and their college funds! Outrageous!

Hoiles didn’t call his chain Freedom Newspapers for nothing.

Since “R.C” is no longer around, however, we relatively young (“R.C.” was 70 years my senior!) libertarian/conservative “curmudgeons in training” will just have to pick up the slack!
 

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