Lessons from a Lemonade Stand Read online

  ADDITIONAL PRAISE FOR

  LESSONS FROM A LEMONADE STAND

  “Lessons from a Lemonade Stand is the book I wish had been available to me when my children were teenagers and were asking me about government, law, and freedom. In a clear and understandable way it explains why the state is a problem for those of us who value freedom, what real law is, as opposed to the fickle and often irrational dictates of so-called “lawmakers,” and why our consent to government may not be all that it appears to be on the surface. If you want to know why kids who sell lemonade outside their homes are dangerous law-breakers who must be forcibly restrained lest they cause you irreparable harm, read this book!”

  —Gerard Casey, professor emeritus of philosophy at University College Dublin and author, Libertarian Anarchy

  “Ever have that gut reaction against a stupid law or bumbling bureaucracy—the incensed feeling that it’s just plain wrong? Boyack has your back. He reveals that not only is your gut correct, but that there are principled, logical reasons why. Lessons from a Lemonade Stand provides crucial distinctions between what’s legal and what’s right, states and governments, and obedience versus justice. It also provides a compelling alternative.”

  —Isaac Morehouse, founder of Praxis and author, Freedom Without Permission

  An unconventional guide to government

  CONNOR BOYACK

  LIBERTAS PRESS

  SALT LAKE CITY, UT

  Copyright © 2017 by Connor Boyack.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Libertas Press

  785 East 200 South, Suite 2

  Lehi, UT 84043

  Lessons from a Lemonade Stand: An Unconventional Guide to Government — 1st ed.

  ISBN-13 978-1-943521-18-0 (paperback)

  First Edition: December 2017

  For bulk orders, send inquires to [email protected].

  To Aaron Russo

  for being my Morpheus

  Other titles by the author:

  Passion-Driven Education: How to Use Your Child’s Interests to Ignite a Lifelong Love of Learning

  Feardom: How Politicians Exploit Your Emotions

  and What You Can Do to Stop Them

  The Tuttle Twins children’s book series

  Anxiously Engaged: Essays on Faith,

  Family, & Freedom

  Latter-day Responsibility: Choosing Liberty

  through Personal Accountability

  Latter-day Liberty: A Gospel Approach to

  Government and Politics

  None are more hopelessly enslaved than

  those who falsely believe they are free.

  —JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

  INTRODUCTION

  N

  If your neighborhood is anything like mine, you often see lemonade stands setting up shop during the warm summer season. They’re a great way for children to learn how to run a business and make a sale. And even when siblings drink half of the product or the weather turns cool and cloudy, children are enthralled by the idea of making money in such a fun, refreshing way.

  As it turns out, these lemonade stands are often criminal enterprises.

  Take the case of Abigail Krutsinger, a four-year-old who decided, with her parents’ help, to offer some refreshing drinks to bikers and tourists passing through her small city in Iowa for the annual bicycle ride across the state. After half an hour of selling lemonade at 25 cents per cup, she had made $5—not bad for a girl her age. Then the police arrived and shut her down.

  Abigail’s crime? She didn’t obtain a permit—a government permission slip. Even if she and her family had wanted to obtain this permission, the city was demanding a staggering $400—just to sell some lemonade! Disappointed that his daughter was denied an opportunity to gain experience running a (very) small business, Abigail’s father said, “If the line is drawn to the point where a 4-year-old… can’t sell a couple glasses of lemonade for 25 cents, then I think the line has been drawn at the wrong spot.”1

  Abigail is not an anomaly. A few teenage girls in Midway, Georgia, built enough of an operation that they named themselves the “Midway Lemonade Girls” and got some corporate sponsors. These girls were trying to earn enough money to visit a nearby water park, but their efforts were thwarted by the city’s police chief who, after ending these girls’ experience in entrepreneurship, told reporters he “didn’t know how the lemonade was made, who made it or what was in it.” To obey the law in their city, the girls would have had to pay the city $50 each day for a business and health permit, even if they were operating on their driveway. “It’s kind of crazy that we couldn’t sell lemonade,” said 14-year-old Kasity Dixon, one of the Midway Lemonade Girls. “It was fun, but we had to listen to the cops and shut it down.” The police chief, interviewed by a local news station, recalled what his law enforcement officers had told the girls:

  We had told them, “We understand you guys are young, but still, you’re breaking the law, and we can’t let you do it anymore. The law is the law, and we have to be consistent with how we enforce the laws.”2

  Then there’s the case of the Marriott and Augustine kids, whose families joined forces to sell lemonade to the hordes of people flocking to town for the U.S. Open golf championship. The children, who were raising money to help kids with cancer, were shut down for not having a permit. Even worse, the families were fined a staggering $500! “The message to kids,” one of the moms said, “is that there’s no American dream.”3

  These stories represent just a fraction of the many cases where aspiring young business owners faced a harsh reality of regulations, permits, and prohibitions. All they wanted to do was sell a drink to a consenting customer. Why all the bureaucracy?

  Most parents, if their children experienced a similar encounter with the government, would tell their children to “obey the law.” Jump through the legal hoops required, and if they can’t—or won’t—then shut the business down. This is the conventional wisdom—the path of least resistance.

  But what if it’s wrong?

  What if there is no valid reason why a child should have to seek a permission slip before selling lemonade? What if that child has the right to do so?

  What if a child really needed to earn some money and decided to break the law and sell lemonade anyway?

  What if adults should be able to do the same?

  The answers to these questions apply to much more than mere lemonade. These questions, and many more like them, form the foundation of this book—a review of what’s right, what’s wrong, and in which cases you are justified in saying no when the government tells you to do something you think you shouldn’t have to do.

  Shall we begin?

  

  NOTES

  Mark Carlson, “Coralville Police Shut Down Lemonade Stands During RAGBRAI,” Cedar Rapids (IA) Gazette, August 2, 2011, http://www.thegazette.com/2011/08/02/coralville-police-shut-down-lemonade-stands-during-ragbrai.

  ”3 Girls Busted for Illegal Lemonade Stand,” NBC News, July 15, 2011, http://www.nbcnews.com/id/43769978/ns/us_news-weird_news/t/girls-busted-illegal-lemonade-stand/.

  Harry Bradford, “Children’s Families Fined $500 for Operating Illegal Lemonade Stand,” Huffington Post, June 17, 2011, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/17/us-open-lemonade-fine-neighbors-parking_n_878949.html. Following a backlash in the media, the fine was waved and the children were
allowed to re-open their stand elsewhere.

  “No society can exist unless the laws are respected to a certain degree. The safest way to make laws respected is to make them respectable. When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law. These two evils are of equal consequence, and it would be difficult for a person to choose between them.”1

  Frédéric Bastiat

  THE RULE OF LAW

  N

  Imagine I suddenly stopped you on the street and asked you, “What is a law?” How would you answer? Perhaps you would reply that a law is something the government says you have to do. “Does it matter what type of government?” I might ask. “Are the laws in communist countries or theocratic dictatorships just as valid and binding upon you as those in a democracy or republic?” Now you’re probably having to think a little deeper… and maybe you’re wishing I had stopped the guy walking behind you instead.

  You cautiously answer that a dictator can’t just make up the law. The law is something a bit more fundamental—more principled. That’s it! You confidently tell me that laws have to be based on a principle. Not just any principle, you concede, since people can adhere to principles that are simply wrong. It has to be a true principle—a correct one, you add. But now I’ve backed you into a bit of a corner. “So, everything a government tells a person to do that isn’t based on a true principle isn’t actually a law? Then what do we call that, if not a law?”

  Gulp.

  Don’t worry—most people would struggle to answer these questions. First, they’ve never really thought about these issues before. Second, they lack the education necessary to answer them adequately. That’s not their fault. Government schools—and most private and home schools, for that matter—simply don’t teach this stuff.

  It’s easy to say that “the law” is whatever the government says, but the answer is a bit more complex. Our society uses the word law quite liberally, so in a way, yes, a law is a synonym for a mandate from the government. For example, a reporter might point out, “It’s against the law in North Korea to criticize the government.”2 Or an environmental activist might say, “The law in many states says that you are not allowed to collect the rain that falls on your property.”3 In the United States of America, one might say that children operating lemonade stands is, in most cities, “breaking the law” if they don’t have the necessary paperwork. You get the idea.

  Long before you or I were born, a man named Frédéric Bastiat wrote The Law, an essay in which he attempted to provide the answers to these questions. Here’s how he answered them, and don’t worry if it’s tricky to follow—we’ll analyze what it means in a moment:

  What, then, is law? It is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense. Each of us has a natural right… to defend his person, his liberty, and his property. These are the three basic requirements of life, and the preservation of any one of them is completely dependent upon the preservation of the other two. For what are our faculties but the extension of our individuality? And what is property but an extension of our faculties?

  If every person has the right to defend—even by force—his person, his liberty, and his property, then it follows that a group of men have the right to organize and support a common force to protect these rights constantly. Thus the principle of collective right—its reason for existing, its lawfulness—is based on individual right. And the common force that protects this collective right cannot logically have any other purpose or any other mission than that for which it acts as a substitute. Thus, since an individual cannot lawfully use force against the person, liberty, or property of another individual, then the common force—for the same reason—cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty, or property of individuals or groups.4

  Okay, let’s unpack what he’s saying. You and I have the right to defend ourselves and our property, which is an extension of ourselves—the labor we used in the past in exchange for obtaining that property. If somebody wants to harm you, steal your computer, or kidnap you, you are completely justified in fighting back. You have that right—an individual right. And nobody gave it to you—it’s natural. You have it simply because you are a living person.

  Let’s pretend we’ve crashed on a remote island inhabited by some native people. Each person in our group has this right of self-defense, so if any of the locals try to harm one of us, we are justified in trying to stop the attack. Suppose we decide to organize a system where one person keeps watch while the others build a shelter or sleep. If a native warrior jumps out of the bushes to hurt you while I’m on watch duty, I can rush to your aid and fight him off on your behalf.

  Why is that? I wasn’t being attacked, so I wasn’t defending myself. Am I doing something wrong because I’m not using my individual right of self-defense? The answer is contained in Bastiat’s quote above: we organized to “support a common force to protect [our] rights.” We basically formed a government. Every single person has the right to self-defense, and so we all delegated that right to whoever was “in charge” for that shift. It became a collective right—something that cannot exist unless each individual in the “collective” has the right that has been delegated.

  A “collective” can’t come up with rights out of nowhere; the powers of our new government cannot exceed the powers of those who created the government. In other words, the creature can’t exceed the creators. If you decide to make milk from fallen coconuts in an attempt to barter with the locals for other supplies, the island government can’t prohibit you from doing so unless you first obtain its permission. It’s as Bastiat explained: just as a person is wrong to use force against you—he doesn’t have that right—then the “collective” cannot do it for him. We can’t delegate a right we do not have to the government.

  This, in a nutshell, is law—the real kind, based on a true principle and on individual rights. It’s what we’ll be exploring throughout this book, because understanding what laws a person can justifiably break requires knowing what laws we must follow—and why. To break it down further, let’s explore some different types of law to see how they relate to what we’ve learned here.

  NATURAL LAW

  I can imagine few things more exhilarating than skydiving. If you haven’t experienced it, just try to think of the adrenaline that would surge through your body as you fall from a high altitude to the earth below. As you train to learn the ins and outs of jumping out of an airplane, your instructor would explain the care and attention that goes into packing your parachute. Your life, quite literally, depends upon that neatly folded piece of thin fabric.

  The reason why, of course, is obvious. If you find yourself plummeting towards a very hard surface below and something goes wrong when you try to deploy your parachute, you’re likely going to end up as a big mess on somebody’s property.

  Gravity is unforgiving and always present. Drop something that is heavier than air and it will fall. This reaction is so predictable and observable that we don’t just call it by its name. Instead, we call it the law of gravity.

  Forgive me for pointing out something that is already painfully evident to you: gravity does not exist because a bunch of politicians got together and decided to pass a law requiring objects to fall to the earth. A majority vote did not create this condition, nor can a vote stop it from happening. It exists, rather, because it is a law of nature—a governing rule that is self-evident.

  Self-evident. Does that ring a bell? Thomas Jefferson used the term in the Declaration of Independence when he talked about fundamental truths that were among the reasons the American colonists seceded from Britain in order to govern themselves. As you may recall, here’s what he wrote:

  We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness.

  What Jefferson is referring to are natural laws, or self-evident truths, that are observable and indisputable statements that clearly reflect man’s relationship one to another. When we are born we are all equal, no matter our parents’ race, religion, location, or lineage. And, importantly, we all have the right to our life, our liberty, and our future self-determination.

  Few today understand this, but in America’s first few decades it was widely understood. (Except for that part about race, sadly.) John Quincy Adams—the fifth U.S. president and son of John Adams—once noted that the colonists had “renounc[ed]… all claims to chartered rights as Englishmen. Henceforth their charter was the Declaration of Independence. Their rights, the natural rights of mankind.”5 Natural rights. Natural law. Their rights didn’t come from the English government, nor from a document or majority vote. They were appealing to a higher, more fundamental law.

  Some might think that Jefferson coined the term or sparked a more widespread understanding of natural law, but that’s not really the case. Jefferson himself said, some fifty years after he helped draft the Declaration of Independence, that it was merely “intended to be an expression of the American mind”6 at the time it was written. People already understood the priority of natural law over the “laws” that a government might make. If you look at what colonial legislatures were saying before the Declaration was written in 1776, you’ll find similar language showing their agreement.

  As just one example, consider the Resolutions of the House of Representatives of Massachusetts, written on October 29, 1765. This document served as a defiant objection to the infamous Stamp Act—an egregious new tax on every piece of printed paper the colonists used. Notice the references to natural, self-evident rights contained in just the first two of fourteen total resolutions: