Jack Kevorkian, who was born May 26, 1928, died two days ago, at age 83.
In the latter phase of his life, Kevorkian campaigned tirelessly to legalize physician-assisted suicide — a subject about which he was intensely passionate (too passionate, some believed) and even served eight years in prison for “acts of euthanasia.”
From 1990 to 2000, Jack Kevorkian was arrested many, many times for helping more than 100 patients commit suicide. He used injections, carbon monoxide, and his now-infamous “suicide machine,” which he hammered together from scraps for approximately $30.
“Those he aided had terminal conditions such as multiple sclerosis, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and malignant brain tumors. When asked in a 2010 interview about how it felt to take a patient’s life, Dr. Kevorkian said, ‘I didn’t do it to end a life. I did it to end the suffering the patient’s going through. The patient’s obviously suffering — what’s a doctor supposed to do, turn his back?’
“Dying, he believed, should be an intimate and dignified process, something that many terminally ill people are denied, he said.
“He garnered a fair amount of support from other medical practitioners, although most thought he was an extremist. In 1995, a group of doctors in Michigan publicly voiced their support for Dr. Kevorkian’s philosophy, stating that they supported a ‘merciful, dignified, medically assisted termination of life.’
“Shortly after, a study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that many doctors in Oregon and Michigan supported some form of physician-assisted suicide in certain cases.
“One of his greatest victories occurred in March 1996 when a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in California ruled that mentally competent, terminally ill adults have a constitutional right to die with the aid of medical experts and family members. It was the first federal endorsement of its kind” (source).
Arguably, Jack Kevorkian’s lasting legacy will be in the fact that he (with the invaluable help of his smart and charismatic lawyer Mayer Morganroth) so thoroughly raised the world’s awareness about euthanasia, and I, for one, was a supporter of him: obviously, if we each possess the right to our own life — and we do — we also (therefore) possess the corollary right to end that life when we choose.
Death, where is thy sting?
Jack Kevorkian, MD, jazz musician, oil-painter, euthanasianist: May 26, 1928 – June 3, 2011
June 4th marks the twenty-two year anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing, China. This was when the communist dictatorship of that country quashed a political reform movement, which was begun by Beijing students who sought to bring about more freedom.
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) ended these protests by force, which is the only way governments can ever resolve disputes of this sort, since government by definition is an agency of force.
When it was all over, the People’s Republic of China began arresting its people on a widespread scale.
They also went to great lengths to suppress protesters and other people of China who were supportive of the protesters’ cause.
The People’s Republic of China banned the foreign press and controlled all later coverage of the event.
Members of the Party who had publicly sympathized with the protesters were purged, with several high-ranking members placed under house arrest, such as General Secretary Zhao Ziyang. The violent suppression of the Tiananmen Square protest caused widespread international condemnation of the PRC government (Andrew Nathan, The Tiananmen Papers).
The protesters — among whom were advocates of laissez-faire as well as disillusioned communists and Trotskyites and many other groups besides — were united only in their hatred of that oppressive regime. The Tiananmen Square protest was a protest against authoritarianism.
It actually began some seven weeks before, on April 15th, 1989, after the death of a largely pro-free-market, anti-corruption government official named Hu Yaobang. Many Chinese people wanted to mourn his death because they regarded him as something of a hero. By the eve of Hu’s funeral, a million people had gathered in Tiananmen Square.
In fact, many large-scale protests sprung up all throughout the cities of China, including Shanghai. These others remained peaceful, however.
During those seven weeks, many of these protesters were openly discussing a principle that we almost never hear discussed even in this country — though it was this country’s foundational principle — a principle that is so profound and so complex that only a small minority of people today grasp its awesome logic. That principle is the principle of individual rights.
It was, incidentally, this same communistic Chinese government that American pseudo-intellectuals, like Norman Mailer, Howard Zinn, and Noam Chomsky, have described as (quoting Chomsky’s own words) “a relatively livable and just society,” about which “one finds many things that are really quite admirable.” Furthermore says Chomsky:
China is an important example of a new society in which very interesting and positive things happened at the local level, in which a good deal of the collectivization and communization was really based on mass participation and took place after a level of understanding had been reached in the peasantry that led to this next step.
The word Tiananmen literally translates to “Gate of Heavenly Peace.”
Among the people who died in the Tiananmen Square massacre was a young girl, a student, who worked as a pastry chef in a Dim Sum cafe on the Yangtze. She was the daughter of an engineer. In a country that did not (and does not) permit freedom, she came to understand the principle of individual rights and the inseparable link that exists between property and person — which is to say, economics and politics, or body and brain, all of which amount to the same thing. And that, reader, is no small thing.
The 30th of May, 1868, is designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers, or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet churchyard in the land. In this observance no form of ceremony is prescribed, but posts and comrades will in their own way arrange such fitting services and testimonials of respect as circumstances may permit.
This was the first official recognition of Decoration Day — or, as it was later named, Memorial Day.
On that May day in 1868, during the first celebration, General James Garfield (later the twentieth U.S. President, and, incidentally, one of the last great Presidents this country has had) gave a moving speech at Arlington National Cemetery. After his speech was concluded, 5,000 participants decorated the graves of the more than 20,000 Union and Confederate soldiers buried in Arlington Cemetery.
We begin to know about a resource only when we begin to use the resource. Knowing about that resource includes a cursory calculation of its quantity. The more we use of it, therefore, the more adept we become at finding it and calculating its quantity, extracting it and refining it. Thus, the more of it we use, the more of it we’re able to find.
No matter how closely it is defined, the physical quantity of a resource in the earth is not fully known at any time, because resources are sought and found only as they are needed. Even if the quantities of a particular resource were exactly known, such measurements would not be meaningful, because humans have a near-limitless capacity for developing additional ways to meet our needs: developing fiber optics, for instance, instead of copper wire … (Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2).
The Texas field, known as the Eagle Ford, is just one of about 20 new onshore oil fields that advocates say could collectively increase the nation’s oil output by 25 percent within a decade — without the dangers of drilling in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico or the delicate coastal areas off Alaska.
There’s a catch, of course: as you would suspect, the Religion of Environmentalism — of which church the socialist Barack Obama and his clownish administration are great devotees — fight tooth-and-nail to prevent such extraction. Why? Because extracting oil from rock requires hydraulic fracturing — a process known as fracking — and this in turn means that we must actually use our environment. Damned if we do, damned if we don’t.
Such is the nature of environmentalism.
In related news, check out this gorgeous photo of some real alternative energy: turning natural gas into diesel.
A typically morbid being cannot become healthy, much less make itself healthy. For a typically healthy person, conversely, being sick can even become an energetic stimulus for life, for living more. This, in fact, is how that long period of sickness appears to me now: as it were, I discovered life anew, including myself; I tasted all good and even little things, as others cannot easily taste them—I turned my will to health, to life, into a philosophy.
For it should be noted: it was during the years of my lowest vitality that I ceased to be a pessimist; the instinct of self-restoration forbade me a philosophy of poverty and discouragement.
What is it, fundamentally, that allows us to recognize who has turned out well? That a well-turned-out person pleases our senses, that he is carved from wood that is hard, delicate, and at the same time smells good. He has a taste only for what is good for him; his pleasure, his delight cease where the measure of what is good for him is transgressed. He guesses what remedies avfail against what is harmful; he exploits bad accidents to his advantage; what does not kill him makes him stronger. Instinctively, he collects from everything he sees, hears, lives through, his sum: he is a principle of selection, he discards much. He is always in his own company, whether he associates with books, human beings, or landscapes: he honors by choosing, by admitting, by trusting. He reacts slowly to all kinds of stimuli, with that slowness which long caution and deliberate pride have bred in him: he examines the stimulus that approaches him, he is far from meeting it halfway. He believes neither in “misfortune” nor in “guilt”: he comes to terms with himself, with others; he knows how to forget—he is strong enough; hence everything must turn out for his best.
Well, then, I am the opposite of a decadent, for I have just described myself.
In addition to this awesomeness, Kiss star Gene Simmons — who was born and partially raised in Haifa, Israel, with the name Chaim Witz — recently contributed something equally excellent to the world:
JANE WELLS, CNBC: What do you think of President Obama’s suggestion that the borders be redrawn pre-67?
GENE SIMMONS, KISS: President Obama, I voted for an idea. What I didn’t realize what I was getting was an idealist. If you’ve never been to the moon, you can’t issue policy about the moon. You have no f—king idea what it’s like on the moon. For a president to be sitting in Washington, D.C., and saying, “Go back to your 67 borders in Israel,” how about you live there and try to defend an indefensible border nine miles wide? On one side you’ve got hundreds of millions of people who hate your guts, on the other side you’ve got the Mediterranean. Unless you control, in Israel, unless you control those Golan Heights, it’s an indefensible position….
“The most pathetic body on the face of the planet.” Simmons called the U.N. a “paper tiger” that allows dictators to spread propaganda.
For the 48th time since 1992, the Indiana man has been arrested for inhaling paint fumes. Gibson’s latest huffing collar came when his wife summoned cops to the couple’s Fort Wayne home shortly after midnight on April 14.
As seen in the above mug shot, officers found an impaired Gibson covered in silver paint. He was booked into the Allen County jail for allegedly inhaling toxic vapors.
The image of Gibson will likely draw comparisons to the classic booking photo of Patrick “Goldface” Tribett, an Ohio man who has earned online infamy for his series of paint-dappled mug shots.
The following photos were captured by Zombie on May 5, 2011, at the May Day rally in downtown Los Angeles. This event was co-sponsored by the SEIU — a gigantic socialist labor organization that Barack Obama is famously fond of:
Barack Obama:
Everybody: There’s not a presidential candidate, a gubernatorial candidate, a congressional candidate, who won’t tell ya, that they’re pro-union, when they’re looking for their endorsements. They’ll all say, ‘Oh we love SEIU.’ But the question you gotta ask yourself is, do they have it in their gut, do they have a track record of standing alongside you on picket lines? Do they have a track record of going after the companies that aren’t letting you organize? Do they have a track record of voting the right way? But also helping you organize to build more and more power?
And some of you know I come from an organizing background, so — I’ve been working with the SEIU before I was elected to anything. When I was a community organizer, SEIU Local 880 and myself we organized people, to make sure that healthcare workers had basic rights; we organized voter registration drives, that’s how we built political power on the South Side of Chicago….and now the time has come for us to do it all across this country, and then we’ll paint the nation purple, with SEIU!
I would not be a United States Senator had it not been for the support of your brothers and sisters in Illinois. Those folks, they supported me early, they supported me often. I’ve got my purple windbreaker from my campaign in 2004.
And so, we’ve just got, what, four more days? Four more days of knocking on some doors. Four more days of working the precinct. Four more days of making sure all your co-workers are caucusing. SEIU, I am glad you are with me, let’s together change the country! SEIU! SEIU! SEIU! SEIU! SEIU!”
Dr. Paul HsiehDoctor Paul Hsieh, an MD who practices in the south Denver metro area, has a deep grasp of the philosophical roots of freedom, both political and economic, and for this reason he despises the left almost as much as he despises the right. Almost. Which is why he infuriated so many of us in 2008 with his outrageous equivocations — equivocations that he’s dearly paying for now.
His equivocations, however, do not preclude him from writing with great limpidity about the subject of healthcare — about which he, being a doctor, is an expert.
The following passage is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the healthcare crisis that we’re now in — and have been in for many decades — and which ObamaCare will only exacerbate a thousandfold.
Massachusetts: The Canary in the Coal Mine for ObamaCare
The ongoing failure of the “universal health care” plan in Massachusetts serves as a clear warning to the rest of America
Five years ago, Massachusetts adopted its “universal health care” plan, which served as the template for President Obama’s subsequent national health care legislation. However, Massachusetts’ problems of rising health costs and worsening access foreshadow similar problems for the rest of America — as well as how to avoid them.
The Massachusetts Medical Society recently reported that the state law has resulted in “longer patient wait times [and] continued difficult access to primary care physicians.” The average wait time in Massachusetts to see an internal medicine physician is now 48 days — double the national average. Over half of primary care practices are no longer accepting new patients. Fewer physicians are accepting the state-run Commonwealth Care and Commonwealth Choice insurance plans. So although Massachusetts politicians frequently boast that they have increased “coverage,” many patients cannot find doctors to provide them with actual medical care.
Meanwhile health costs continue to skyrocket out of control, both for the state government and for privately insured patients. In a recent Forbes article, Sally Pipes notes that over the next 10 years, the plan will cost the state government $2 billion more than predicted. Similarly, prior to the new law insurance prices in Massachusetts increased at a rate 3.7% slower than the national average; after the “reform,” they’re increasing 5.8% faster.
To cut costs, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick has proposed replacing the standard payment system with draconian “global budgets” where doctors and hospitals would be given a fixed amount to care for the patients assigned to them. The providers would then keep a portion of the savings if they came under budget (or suffer penalties if they ran over budget) — thus creating morally perverse incentives to deny care to their patients.
The access problems have gotten so bad that the state legislature even considered forcing doctors to accept government-controlled insurance rates as a condition of retaining their state medical licenses (regardless of whether or not the doctors lost money on each patient). As Massachusetts-based health policy analyst Jared Rhoads describes it, this would be responding to the failures created by the government’s insurance mandate by imposing a new “physician mandate.”
Given this hostile practice climate, it is no wonder that many Massachusetts physicians are considering opting out of the government-run system into “concierge practices” — or leaving the state altogether. Dr. Lorraine Schratz, a Massachusetts pediatric cardiologist, noted that half of physicians trained in the state are leaving due to the poor practice environment and poor reimbursements.
Because the ObamaCare national health plan is closely modeled after the Massachusetts plan, we are beginning to see early signs of similar problems developing nationally.
One of the ways ObamaCare will attempt to expand “coverage” will be via dramatically expanding the Medicaid program. But as Medicaid patient Nicole Dardeau recently told the New York Times, “My Medicaid card is useless for me right now…. It’s a useless piece of plastic. I can’t find an orthopedic surgeon or a pain management doctor who will accept Medicaid.” New Orleans ER physician James Aiken similarly noted, “Having a Medicaid card in no way assures access to care.” Once again, politicians can promise theoretical “coverage,” but this is not the same as actual medical care.
Noam Chomsky — a stated Marxist who does not like America and yet continues to live very well here (as he has all his life) — shows us once again just how enamored he is of the asinine, and Christopher Hitchens properly skewers him for it:
Anybody visiting the Middle East in the last decade has had the experience: meeting the hoarse and aggressive person who first denies that Osama Bin Laden was responsible for the destruction of the World Trade Center and then proceeds to describe the attack as a justified vengeance for decades of American imperialism. This cognitive dissonance—to give it a polite designation—does not always take that precise form. Sometimes the same person who hails the bravery of al-Qaida’s martyrs also believes that the Jews planned the “operation.” As far as I know, only leading British “Truther” David Shayler, a former intelligence agent who also announced his own divinity, has denied that the events of Sept. 11, 2001, took place at all. (It was apparently by means of a hologram that the widespread delusion was created on television.) In his recent article for Guernica magazine, however, professor Noam Chomsky decides to leave that central question open. We have no more reason to credit Osama Bin Laden’s claim of responsibility, he states, than we would have to believe Chomsky’s own claim to have won the Boston Marathon.
I can’t immediately decide whether or not this is an improvement on what Chomsky wrote at the time. Ten years ago, apparently sharing the consensus that 9/11 was indeed the work of al-Qaida, he wrote that it was no worse an atrocity than President Clinton’s earlier use of cruise missiles against Sudan in retaliation for the bomb attacks on the centers of Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. (I haven’t been back to check on whether he conceded that those embassy bombings were also al-Qaida’s work to begin with.) He is still arguing loudly for moral equivalence, maintaining that the Abbottabad, Pakistan, strike would justify a contingency whereby “Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic.” (Indeed, equivalence might be a weak word here, since he maintains that, “uncontroversially, [Bush’s] crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s.”) So the main new element is the one of intriguing mystery. The Twin Towers came down, but it’s still anyone’s guess who did it. Since “April 2002, [when] the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, informed the press that after the most intensive investigation in history, the FBI could say no more than that it ‘believed’ that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan,” no evidence has been adduced. “Nothing serious,” as Chomsky puts it, “has been provided since.”
Chomsky still enjoys some reputation both as a scholar and a public intellectual. And in the face of bombardments of official propaganda, he prides himself in a signature phrase on his stern insistence on “turning to the facts.” So is one to assume that he has pored through the completed findings of the 9/11 Commission? Viewed any of the videos in which the 9/11 hijackers are seen in the company of Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri? Read the transcripts of the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called “20th hijacker”? Followed the journalistic investigations of Lawrence Wright, Peter Bergen, or John Burns, to name only some of the more salient? Acquainted himself with the proceedings of associated and ancillary investigations into the bombing of the USS Cole or indeed the first attempt to bring down the Twin Towers in the 1990s?
Dear Ray Harvey: What is your opinion of Noam Chomsky? I ask because, like everyone else in academia, I think he’s about the smartest man in the world.
Do you by any chance mean the Noam Chomsky who’s simply another Marxist, telling a group, in December of 1967, that in Communist China “one finds many things that are really quite admirable” — stating furthermore:
China is an important example of a new society in which very interesting and positive things happened at the local level, in which a good deal of the collectivization and communization was really based on mass participation and took place after a level of understanding had been reached in the peasantry that led to this next step.
The Noam Chomsky who then goes on to explicitly endorse Chairman Mao the murderer, calling Mao’s blood-red China a “relatively livable” and “just society,” speaking, not coincidentally, five years after the end of the great Chinese famine of 1958–1962, the worst famine in all of human history?
Well, perhaps this particular Noam Chomsky wasn’t aware that the sort of collectivization he supports, inherent to Marxism of any brand, was the principal cause of that horrific famine, which killed over 30 million.
Maybe, maybe.
And yet, quoting Chomsky’s own words:
I don’t accept the view that we can just condemn the NLF terror, period, because it was so horrible. I think we really have to ask questions of comparative costs, ugly as that may sound. And if we are going to take a moral position on this – and I think we should – we have to ask both what the consequences were of using terror and not using terror. If it were true that the consequences of not using terror would be that the peasantry in Vietnam would continue to live in the state of the peasantry of the Philippines, then I think the use of terror would be justified.
I suppose that in the end, whichever Noam Chomsky you’re referring to, D, it makes little difference. A Marxist by any other name is still a Marxist — and that means this:
Chomsky is a devoted and lifelong advocate of authoritarianism and collectivism. He is for this reason an absolute enemy of individual rights and the freedom of each. And that, sir, is what I think of Noam Chomsky.
Obama's "friend and mentor" Jeremia Wright“[My grandmother] is a typical white person.”
— Nobel Peace Prize Winner Barack Obama, 2008
Now that the American military has at long last killed Osama bin Laden, Obama’s sagging approval ratings have jumped some six points. Obama is riding pretty high, and so I think it’s important to remind folks once again who this fellow really is and what he represents: a liar and a race-obsessed socialist.
Obama in his own words:
“Just because you possess an individual right doesn’t mean local governments can’t constrain the exercise of that right” (Barack Obama, 2008, Philadelphia primary).
“I ceased to advertise my mother’s race at the age of twelve or thirteen when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites” (Barack Obama, Dreams From My Father, pg xiv).
“That’s just how white folks will do you. It wasn’t merely the cruelty involved; I was learning that black people could be mean and then some. It was a particular brand of arrogance, an obtuseness in otherwise sane people that brought forth our bitter laughter. It was as if whites didn’t know that they were being cruel in the first place. Or at least thought you deserving of their scorn” (Barack Obama, Ibid, pg. 80).
“Questions of competition, decisions forced by a market economy and majoritarian rule; issues of power. It was this unyielding reality-that whites were not only phantoms to be expunged from our dreams but were an active and varied fact of our everyday lives-that finally explained how nationalism could thrive as an emotion and flounder as a program” (Barack Obama, Ibid, Pg 202).
Here is Barack Obama’s admission that he’s not only a socialist, but a socialist of the black-nationalist variety:
Nationalism provided that history, an unambiguous morality tale that was easily communicated and easily grasped. A steady attack on the white race, the constant recitation of black people’s brutal experience in this country, served as the ballast that could prevent the ideas of personal and communal responsibility from tipping into an ocean of despair. Yes, the nationalist would say, whites are responsible for your sorry state, not any inherent flaws in you. In fact, whites are so heartless and devious that we can no longer expect anything from them. The self-loathing you feel, what keeps you drinking or thieving, is planted by them. Rid them from your mind and find your true power liberated. Rise up, ye mighty race! … In a sense, then, Rafiq was right when he insisted that, deep down, all blacks were potential nationalists. The anger was there, bottled up and often turned inward. And as I thought about Ruby and her blue eyes, the teenagers calling each other ‘nigger’ and worse, I wondered whether, for now at least, Rafiq wasn’t also right in preferring that that anger be redirected; whether a black politics that suppressed rage toward whites generally, or one that failed to elevate race loyalty above all else, was a politics inadequate to the the task.
It was a painful thought to consider, as painful now as it had been years ago. It contradicted the morality my mother had taught me, a morality of subtle distinctions — between individuals of goodwill and those wished me ill, between active malice and ignorance or indifference. I had a personal stake in that moral framework; I’d discovered that I couldn’t escape it if I tried…. And yet perhaps it was a framework that blacks in this country could no longer afford; perhaps it weakened black resolve, encouraged confusion within the ranks. Desperate times called for desperate measures, and for many blacks, time were chronically desperate. If nationalism could create a strong and effective insularity, deliver on its promise of self-respect, then the hurt it might cause well-meaning whites, or the inner turmoil it caused people like me, would be of little consequence…. If nationalism could deliver. As it turned out, questions of effectiveness, and not sentiment, caused most of my quarrels with Rafiq (Barack Obama, Ibid, Pg. 198-201, boldface mine).
Obama has also famously told us that Reverend Jeremiah Wright — the racist anti-American pastor whose church Obama attended for twenty years — was not only his pastor but also his “friend and mentor” and like a “member of the family.” Jeremiah Wright’s church, Obama once said, “helps me keep my moral compass straight and define my priorities.”
No signing statements to nullify or undermine congressional instructions as enacted into law? (Obama Lies to Keep Czars).
No “boots” on the ground Libya. “Anyone that has worked with the AC-130 gunship can tell you, you need spotters to let aircraft know where the targets are. Usually it is Special Forces, Rangers etc trained for this mission” (it’s CIA Agents in Libya on the ground).
“Reform will also rein in the abuse and excess that nearly brought down our financial system. It will finally bring transparency to the kinds of complex, risky transactions that helped trigger the financial crisis (Obama Lies About Financial Reform Bill).
Political correctness run amok. Christ, I hope this isn’t true:
WASHINGTON — US forces administered Muslim religious rites for Osama bin Laden aboard an aircraft carrier Monday in the Arabian Sea, an American official said after the raid that killed the Al-Qaeda leader.
“Today religious rights were conducted for the deceased on the deck of the USS Carl-Vinson which is located in the North Arabian Sea,” a senior defense official said.
“Traditional procedures for Islamic burial were followed. The deceased’s body was washed and then placed in a white sheet. The body was placed in a weighted bag.
“A military officer read prepared religious remarks which were translated into Arabic by a native speaker. After the words were complete, the body was placed on a prepared flat-board… (and) eased into the sea.”
The ceremony began at 0510 GMT and ended some 50 minutes later aboard the aircraft carrier which is stationed off the coast of Pakistan to help US and coalition forces in Afghanistan.
The following is, on a micro level, a perfect compendiation of free-trade versus government regulation, all in the name of the so-called common good.
It was written by a bureaucrat (no less) fellow free-marketeer named Nicolas Martin, who’s the executive director of the Consumer Health Education Council in Indianapolis — and whom I incorrectly branded a bureaucrat until he gently corrected me — and it provides us with an excellent illustration of the axiom that once allowed in, bureaucracy becomes unstoppable.
My 8-year-old recently got the lemonade stand itch. So we started laying plans to enrich her college fund by enticing passers-by with white chocolate-pistachio cookies and juice from organic lemons. Fortunately, our property backs onto one of the busiest paved urban trails in America, bustling on weekends with cyclists, rollerbladers and pedestrians. Visions of dollars danced in our heads.
Googling for the perfect lemonade recipe, we soon found a site promoting a May 1 “national” event called Lemonade Day. This event, organizers say, is an “initiative designed to teach kids how to start, own and operate their own business — a lemonade stand.” What better day to begin building our lemonade empire?
After shopping for her raw materials, I gave my kid a bedtime primer about starting a business. How much profit do you make after expenses? How should you promote your business? Give the customer a great product. She soaked it up and went to sleep all inspiration and smiles. Then I got to thinking about something I hadn’t discussed with her: government regulations.
The next morning I began a three-day phone trek through the maze of government agencies that regulate businesses and food sales, and I watched my child’s All-American plan crumble like fresh-baked cookies.
My first call was to the parks department, which maintains the trail. That agency is a sponsor of the local Lemonade Day, but, alas, does not permit lemonade stands on its properties any other day of the year. It especially doesn’t allow them alongside the trail. Why? They would be “dangerous”; accidents would happen. Do they expect any accidents on Lemonade Day, I asked? “No, we are confident nothing bad will happen that day.” Poof! Our best option for a profitable lemonade stand was gone.
My next calls were to the health department, where I eventually found an official who cheerfully told me that, except on Lemonade Day, no child can legally operate a lemonade stand in our city. Nowhere. No time. As far as she is concerned, Lemonade Day itself is just food poisoning waiting to happen.
A practical woman as well as a killjoy, she said that near her home, she wouldn’t prevent a kid from operating a stand: “The neighbors would hate me.” But if her department got a complaint about a kid in another neighborhood, the enforcement team would be dispatched. The kid would be instructed to shut down his stand. If he refused to obey, the police would be called to cite the child for violating the health code, which applies to children no less than to adults.
Most likely, no official would brave public ridicule for lowering the boom on a kid with a lemonade stand. But a parent might be a less controversial target for enforcement penalties, which could include fines and even jail time.
Don’t scoff. From time to time, zealous officials do force kids to shut down their lemonade stands. Even Girl Scouts have gotten into trouble for selling cookies in front of homes and businesses.
What the Lemonade Day organizers should teach the children, said the health official, is about the importance of learning and obeying the government regulations that prohibit lemonade stands.
If we had made it past the health and parks departments, my kid would have been stymied by zoning laws that prohibit lemonade stands in residential neighborhoods. Overcoming that barrier, we would have hung our heads at the daunting costs of business and vending licenses, not to mention taxes.
Lemonade Day is promoted as a way to “inspire a budding entrepreneur!” But it is actually a dispiriting lesson about how hard it now is to become an entrepreneur, whether you’re an adult or a child. It is about how even the most harmless enterprise, the humble lemonade stand, has been sacrificed on the altar of government regulation.
Learning to be an entrepreneur “starts with a lemonade stand,” say the organizers of Lemonade Day. But they don’t want to talk about the regulations that make it impossible for my kid to become a lemonade stand entrepreneur. They tell me it is “silly” and “beside the point” to focus on the regulations. I am told that Lemonade Day is about kids learning to “give back to their communities,” “do better in school” and “open bank accounts.” It is not about something so self-serving as making a profit by selling a good product. That is the old American way, but the new way is living with rules that banish the lemonade stand to one government-approved day a year.
What are my kid and I going to do on Lemonade Day? We are going to set up a stand in one of the permitted locations — in a park or at one of the approved sponsors — with hundreds of other kids doing the same thing. But our “secret ingredient” is that we will hand out leaflets explaining why operating a lemonade stand makes my kid and yours not just a hopeful entrepreneur, but an actual lawbreaker.
Born in a sour waste lot
You labored up to light,
Bunching what strength you’d got
And running out of sight
Through a knot-hole at last,
To come forth into sun
As if without a past,
Done with it, re-begun.
Now street-side of the fence
You take a few green turns,
Nimble in nonchalance
Before your first flower burns.
From poverty and prison
And undernourishment
A prodigal has risen,
Self-spending, never spent.
Irregular yellow shell
And drooping spur behind…
Not rare but beautiful
— Street-handsome — as you wind
And leap, hold after hold,
A golden runaway,
Still running, strewing gold
From side to side all day.
Jack Kevorkian, who was born May 26, 1928, died two days ago, at age 83. 
