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Chicago Food Carts: A Small Victory for Liberty
We often argue here about government policy toward victimless crimes — or if you prefer, “victimless” crimes — but it’s hard to see a justification for Chicago’s recently lifted city-wide ban on street food vendors. As noted in yesterday’s Cato Institute Daily Podcast, the Illinois Policy Institute took up the fight last year on behalf of vendors such as Sara Travis, who ended up moving to Austin, TX after discovering it was impossible to legally run her mobile coffee business in Chicago.
Doubtless, not all Chicago street vendors are quite as photogenic and likable as Travis, and it’s easy to imagine some regulations specific to mobile food platforms to discourage congestion and similar problems. Unfortunately, the regulations passed are fairly onerous and at least two alderman have moved to ban carts within certain parts of their districts on rather questionable grounds.
Still, any legislation that makes it easier for people to make an honest buck would be an improvement. According to a study from the IPI, Chicago’s prohibition likely resulted in millions of dollars in lost tax revenue, to say nothing of waste through administration and enforcement.
In addition to the financial costs of treating such businesses as criminals, it’s also worth noting the social costs. Laws that treat people conducting honest business as criminals and nuisances plays directly into the narrative that police and other law enforcers should be seen as oppressors rather than protectors of peace and order. And to the extent such bans are effective, they further reduce the number of potential role models available to kids who may be tempted to a life of genuine criminality.
When a police officer walks through a rough neighborhood, people conducting honest and useful business should be able to respond with a wave and a sigh of relief. Laws like this that criminalize such business are inimical to that hope.
Published in Culture, Domestic Policy
Some of the best food in NY City can be found in the food trucks. They spend half their time fleeing authorities, legalization is prohibitively expensive. ( They vote Democrat because we don’t tell them who is responsible for the regulations and corruption, and Democrats chat them up.) It’s parallel to Fernando De Soto’s findings among the illegal markets in capitals around the world. Singapore never fought the car park food stalls. Those stalls were and remain among the best food in the world. Just thinking about them is making me hungry. Authorities made it easy for them by building them street stalls near tourist centers with running water to clean it up, rather than caving into organized restaurants who wanted to use health to run them out of business. They can pay pretty good rents to boot.
They also play directly into the narrative that aspiring to a life of business isn’t any more socially acceptable than aspiring to a life of crime.
Sure. If the law is going harass you for running a food cart and for fencing stolen property, why not choose the occupation where you’re more likely to buy low and sell high? If you genuinely believed the law (i.e, that food-carters deserve the harassment as much as fencers do), you’d believe there’s not even a moral difference between the two.
Rent seeking by brick and mortar food service businesses is the reason for the onerous laws about food trucks. In many ways, similar to the issues between Taxi’s and Uber.
Food trucks can offer a high quality product with a fraction of the overhead, thus lower cost to the consumer. Plus their mobility makes them a threat to multiple retail spaces, so rather than try to compete, they regulate them out of business.
Am I the only Texan, who after listening to Sara Travis, worries she will vote in a way to make Texas more like Illinois?
Betcha.
Seawriter
Hey, look at this, wanna buy a Rolex cheap? Street vendors often maintain high quality inventories, limited only by the length of their arms.
I wouldn’t bet against you, but sometimes people learn.
On the other hand, she looks like a perfect fit for Austin … though I realize this is making your point.
Kinda what I thought, too. Perfect for Austin. And yeah. You are.
I am not against Blue Staters moving to Texas. I fled Michigan for Texas back in 1979 – because the people here had views a whole lot more like mine than those occupying my natal town of Ann Arbor, Michigan. But I want those willing to understand what makes Texas works, and not change it into Michigan or Illinois.
Seawriter
Instead of trying to regulate food trucks out of business, why don’t restaurants lobby to reduce the regulations on their own industry so that they can compete better?
Why should existing restaurants want to encourage competition? Some other restaurant might do a better job than theirs.
Read Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics. As he points out it is easier to raise barriers to entry than to raise your own performance. Existing capitalists hate capitalism because it makes their jobs harder.
It should be the government’s job to remove barriers to entry because society as a whole benefits from competition. But individuals, especially those who already have a good deal, do not benefit from competition. It is easier for them to buy off the government, and easier for individual politicians to allow themselves to be bought off. That is what makes crony capitalism work: partnerships between existing businesses and existing politicians.
In the long run you end up with Chicago and Detroit, but in the long run we are all dead. It takes a long time for things to collapse, and by that time you are old enough to retire, and you take your earnings and buy your place in some banana republic.
Seawriter
My question exactly, about this as well as about the “unfair” tax advantage that internet retailers have over bricks-and-mortar stores.