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It is the simplest, most basic aspect of life: you need food, so you grow some vegetables. If you have extra you sell them on a street corner to your neighbors, and if you live in California you get arrested for it.

Licensing is when the government takes a right from you, and sells it back. This California man failed to purchase his rights back from the state.

But the poor police had pictures taken of them while arresting the man, and now they are hearing from the public about their unjust actions.

The Sheriff’s Department of Alameda County California responded on Facebook to the public outrage, including thousands of criticisms posted to their Facebook page.

Selling food on street corners violates county ordinances and public health codes. Persistent street vending harms local businesses, especially small, start-up food vendors…

There you have it, from the horse’s mouth in plain black and white: the point of licenses is protection. You pay to play, if you don’t pay off the city and county, they will send their hired thugs to rough you up and demand the protection money.

It harms local businesses: apparently it is the government’s job to make sure there is no competition for certain businesses. God forbid the consumer has a choice.

And why isn’t this guy’s produce selling operation considered a small, start-up street vendor?

Simple because he didn’t pay for his rights.

Yet the Ninth Amendment in the Bill of Rights says, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

And the 24th Amendment outlawed the poll tax, saying the right to vote had been abridged by charging citizens money in order to exercise that right.

Both of these amendments suggest that licensing–charging money for doing a normal activity, having to pay just to live your life–is one method of denying a person’s rights.

And two Supreme Court cases affirm this:

In Murdock v. Pennsylvania, 319 U.S. 105 (1943), the Supreme Court stated that a law requiring solicitors to purchase a license was an unconstitutional tax on the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ right to freely exercise their religion. The Court ruled that “The state cannot and does not have the power to license, nor tax, a Right guaranteed to the people,” and “No state shall convert a liberty into a license, and charge a fee therefore.”

In another case, the Court ruled similarly, that “If the State converts a right (liberty) into a privilege, the citizen can ignore the license and fee and engage in the right (liberty) with impunity.” (Shuttlesworth v. City of Birmingham, Alabama, 373 U.S. 262).

Earning money, engaging in basic trade, selling the excess of your labor all falls under the category of natural rights, the pursuit of happiness, liberty or whatever you want to call it. The government has no business arresting someone for selling vegetables.

So the county has their pieces of paper that say he cannot sell without a license, and he has different pieces of paper that say he can. No one bothers to think about what is right, especially the police “just doing their jobs.”

The police don’t make the rules, they just enforce them. So at what point will a law become too unjust to enforce? At what point does a cop quit his job, because he is the agent of injustice? That is such a stupid attempt to absolve oneself of responsibility.

A police officer is an individual who can choose to do evil or not. Doing injustice to fellow human beings for a salary doesn’t make it any better. Following the orders of politicians doesn’t make a cop’s actions peaceful. Throwing people in cages for selling vegetables is a terrible thing to do as one individual to another, and one should not hide behind a badge, uniform, department, or politician while being a bad person.

Let’s look at the rest of the excuse given by the Sheriff’s Department.

Selling food on street corners… poses certain health risks such as E. coli and other food borne illnesses.

Okay, getting a license doesn’t stop E. coli. There have been plenty of outbreaks in licensed food, as well as government-owned water supplies. This is simply a justification given for extortion. The government isn’t testing every veggie, and they aren’t watching every restaurant employee to make sure they wash their hands before returning to work–even if they make the restaurant hang the sign.

The Sheriff’s office continued:

In addition, illegal vending causes traffic safety issues and vendors are sometimes the target of street robberies.

Ah, there you go! The police arrested the man to help him and protect him. They defacto robbed him (the costs of going through the legal system, as well as lost veggies, and lost revenue) in order to protect him from being robbed.

And they will just throw in a “traffic safety issue” for good measure. That farmstand is much more distracting than blinding blue lights flashed all over the city whenever someone is going 5 mph over the speed limit.

(On a side note, have you ever thought about how much more dangerous it is to be parked on the side of a highway after being pulled over, versus going 80 or even 90 miles per hour with the traffic?)

The whole situation is just absurd. We don’t need police running around arresting vegetable vendors–we don’t even need them arresting drug dealers!

If the police would focus on solving the millions of rapes which they never investigate, or perhaps the 39% of murders that never get cleared, maybe their Facebook pages wouldn’t be bombarded by angry citizens as often.

The clear answer is to continue to resist and engage in your highly illegal selling of vegetables, and anything else, regardless of what the law says. Support the illegal farmstand on the roadside, and engage in gray and black markets with your community.

Support the illegal farmstand on the roadside, and engage in gray and black markets with your community.

In fact, a fun activity of resistance is to actively seek out opportunities to engage in unlicensed vending and trade. This strengthens the undocumented market.

The raw milk in my cereal was sold to me illegally, which makes it that much more delicious.

Reprinted with permission from The Daily Bell.

From Lew Rockwell, here.

On February 15, I ordered an out of print pamphlet from an online bookseller called Oddball Books, based in La La Land, People’s Democratic, Liberated, Socialized, Tummy Tucked and Sometimes Electrified Republic of California. I requested that it be sent to my post office box here in the People’s Hillaryized Republic of Gotham. Oddball duly informed me by e-mail that it was mailed through the Post Office’s Priority Mail service on Friday, February 16. Impressed by the efficiency of private enterprise, but aware that using the government’s mail was risky business, I eagerly anticipated the arrival of a rare work by Frank Chodorov, albeit with some uneasiness. This would fill a lacuna in my library, and amuse the dust mites that call it home.

Priority Mail advertises two to three-day delivery, so I expected to receive it by Wednesday, February 21. In the past the Post Office has fraudulently compared this service with FedEx and UPS, despite the fact that the latter have online tracking and real accountability, something that is as alien to the Post Office as honesty is to a politician, and as the love of liberty is to a Puritan. After two weeks elapsed without receiving the package, I e-mailed Oddball inquiring after its whereabouts. The proprietor responded that he would check with the Post Office.

Now, I am not a conspiracy theorist, despite the best efforts of Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell to demonstrate that history does not proceed in vacuo, and that real people (government miscreants and their crony capitalist friends) have reasons to thwart the free market for their own gain, and to cover their tracks with bogus court history. But when I identify the missing pamphlet as “The Myth of the Post Office,” you might understand my suspicion that maybe there is a conspiracy afoot, with the Post Office as Ground Zero.

A few days later, the proprietor of the book service informed me that he had insured the package and was filling out forms that the Post Office required to conduct its own investigation. (A Post Office investigation of a botched delivery sounds like a military war crimes tribunal you wonder who should be investigating whom.) He was going to send me some forms to fill out also. Great! Would they be in triplicate? As of about two weeks later, April 3, I haven’t received them. Maybe they have a worse service than Priority Mail! Sounds like they ll need two investigations, and a slightly bigger budget to cover both. And don’t forget — yet more funding to cover the cost of the lost paperwork. (That big tax reduction proposed by Jim Ostrowski appears to be in some jeopardy, and we haven’t even got to the Department of Labor [which does no labor]. After all, it costs the Post Office at least 50 percent more than private enterprise to deliver a package.)

A couple of days ago, I requested a refund, which I hope to receive soon. I also informed Oddball of my thinking about insuring packages entrusted to the Post Office. It occurred to me that such a practice is similar to posting a sign in front of a bank that says “No Guards or Security Systems Inside,” which would be an open sesame to bank robbers. Flagging a package sent through the government’s snail mail for insurance tells a postal bureaucrook that it’s a valuable package. Which Priority Mail package is he going to steal one that’s uninsured or one that’s insured? The irony is, as I pointed out to Oddball, that the package probably would have had a better chance of arriving safely uninsured.

At least I have a reprint of “The Myth of the Post Office,” which appeared as chapter 16 in Frank Chodorov’s book One Is a Crowd: Reflections of an Individualist. There is some consolation in rereading this essay now. It seems that I also have to go back to school on conspiracy theories, starting with the Rockwell-edited collection The Irrepressible Rothbard. And I’m having UPS deliver this time, because a tome is a terrible thing to waste, especially on a mindless bureaucrook.

From Lew Rockwell, here.