People Care About Oppressive Business Regulations When They Ensnare Cute Little Girls

The holiday outrage du jour comes from
Portland, Oregon, as adorable little Madison Root, 11, was barred
from selling her dad’s mistletoe at a local weekend craft market to
pay for her braces.

KATU in Portland
reported the initial incident and what happened afterward:

Madison’s saga started on Saturday morning when she was banned
from selling the mistletoe she collected in downtown Portland
because city code forbids unauthorized sales activity in public
parks, which is where vendors hold the weekly Saturday Market.

KATU News aired a story about the 11-year-old on Sunday night
after her dad called its newsroom.

By Monday, KATU viewers had placed hundreds of orders and a
local entrepreneur even donated $1,000 in seed money to help
Madison grow her business.

Meanwhile, officials in City Hall were silent, refusing to
return phone calls or speak on camera about the city code that
appeared to encourage begging rather than selling.

By Tuesday, television and radio stations across the country
aired KATU’s report for their own local viewers.

Now that there’s a wave of outrage that business regulations can
also be used against adorable little moppets, Portland’s mayor is
discussing possible changes to the city’s codes:

Portland Mayor Charlie Hales confirmed Tuesday morning he met
with Commissioner Amanda Fritz to discuss why city code would ban a
child from selling mistletoe from a public park while allowing
begging, pan-handling, singing, and protesting.

A spokesman for Mayor Hales said he plans to contact the staff
at Portland’s Saturday Market to better understand what happened
and whether procedures could be tweaked to allow kids to sell.

But only kids! If some greasy old homeless guy wants to sell
knick-knacks to try to save up money for an apartment, to hell with
him. Well, unless the Portland Saturday Market (the private
nonprofit organization that oversees the sales in the city park)
agrees to waive the fee and give him a free membership, which is
exactly what they did for little Madison once the news got
around.

It’s a bit interesting to see how people can be outraged about
how these oppressive permitting processes can catch up children
(Reason has reported on any number of incidences of
child entrepreneurship thwarted by municipal
regulations), yet a lot of these same folks see these very same
regulations as important to controlling and monitoring local
businesses for the alleged safety of consumers and good of the
community. Little Madison Root is not some sort of anomaly. She
wasn’t “caught up in the system.” She is exactly the reason for the
system. If she were some middle-aged lady trying to sell macramé
plant-hangers, most (non-libertarians anyway) would not extend the
same outrage at the demand that she should have to get a permit to
sell her crafts.

That’s a real shame. When kids try to start their own little
businesses, we like to think we’re teaching them important
entrepreneurial skills. When agents of the government shut them
down due to suffocating regulatory processes, the kids are the ones
teaching us. But rather than learning, leaders like Mayor Hales
instead want to make exceptions for the adorable.