Posted on 01/30/2014 8:19:19 AM PST by servo1969
The government has pulled the plug on an 11-year-old Illinois baker’s oven.
A day after a local newspaper ran a story about the young and ambitious Chloe Stirling, who operated a cupcake business out of her parents’ kitchen, the local health department came calling.
“They called and said they were shutting us down,” Heather Stirling, Chloe’s mother, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Officials told Stirling Chloe could continue selling cupcakes on the condition that the family “buy a bakery or build her a kitchen separate from the one we have.”
“Obviously, we can’t do that,” Heather Stirling told reporters. “We’ve already given her a little refrigerator to keep her things in, and her grandparents bought her a stand mixer.”
The elder Stirling said that she was willing to get her daughter any necessary licenses or permits to operate a business, but could not meet the health department’s other demands.
“But a separate kitchen? Who can do that?” asked an astonished Stirling.
When reporters approached Amy Yeager, a health department spokeswoman, about the county’s decision to shut down Chloe’s business, she said that she was doing it for the sake of the public.
“The rules are the rules. It’s for the protection of the public health,” Yeager said, according to the Post-Dispatch. “The guidelines apply to everyone.”
“People will react how they choose to react,” she added. “But it is our job.”
Chloe originally started selling the frosted cakes under the name “Hey, Cupcake” to save up for a car when she turns sixteen.
And before the government took her oven mitts, the sixth grader charged $10 for a dozen cupcakes and $2 for each specialty cupcake.
However, she was also known to donate her time and sprinkles to charity.
When a boy in her school was diagnosed with cancer in 2012, she donated cupcakes to helpraise money for his treatment. Adding a personal touch, she made them orange and blue because he “was a really big Cubs fan.”
Her largest order ever, amounting to 220 cupcakes, was also for a cancer fundraiser.
I’m surprised they allow us to have kitchens as dangerous as they are. It’s like a concealed gun in each home. Imagine, these people could have guests over and feed them without a city permit. Oh the humanities...
Does this mean Illinois doesn’t have a “Cottage Food Law”? like many other states, including my state of Texas has?
Not a big deal. I know 100’s of people who have a second kitchen in their basement....Mostly Italians.
If they’re for charity...you don’t sell them...Apparently she’s profiting off the charity.
Based on the SC’s ruling giving the federal government authority by the interstate commerce clause to go after someone who was growing pot for their own use in their own home, it’s only a matter of time.
The kids is making cup-cakes. She’ll probably make a few thousand dollars out of it. To do so the resident city ass-hat demands her family spend upwards of $10 grand to make a second kitchen.
If this ass-hat is a registered Republican, she missed her calling.
Follow the link in the article to the kid’s Facebook page..read her comments.
The kid is going to be a conservative holy terror when she’s a grown-up. One to watch, fer sure.
When charities raffle off a car, it isn’t always a result of the charity being gifted with the car. In some instances the charity purchases the car and sells enough tickets to make a profit for the charity.
What’s wrong with that?
When charity golf tournaments give away cars for holes in one, they purchase insurance policies to cover the cost of the car if someone wins.
What’s wrong with the girl making something for her work, at least covering her expenses? She makes a small profit and the charity makes money on top of that.
Sounds an awful lot like capitalism at work to me.
Perhaps in this work environment, that’s what truly scares the hell out of this ass-hat government nimrod.
Rules like that are a form of “guild socialism” that keeps markets from being diluted by lower startup cost entrepeneurs.
People can bitch and whine about how it’s to “protect the public”, but the bottom line is that it prevents a market interaction between consenting people (though the child is just that, she is supervised by parents).
People who engage in small scale business should just shun publicity.
Why are you putting yourself in the position of defending this twisted bureaucrat?
I agree with your comments.
however, i doubt the little girl is the very first person on Rock Three to ever profit from running a charity....?
If I’m the parent, you’ll have to put me in jail. Touch my kid and you won’t be able to express your regrets verbally.
To fascists everywhere, regulate this! (FR poster makes rude gesture involving one hand and one finger.)
You truly have no understanding of the Liberty our Founders believed in.
The arrogance and condescension is your comments shows clearly that your first instincts are to side with the Power of the State.. Disgusting and quite pathetic.
Rules are made to be broken.
"Well that's what I heard!"
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Now, the regressive policies of elected officials more resemble those of Old World Europe described below than they do to the truly progressive American ideas of the 18th, 19th and early 20th Centuries.
See below:
Coercive regulation and "taking" power, when wielded against the citizenry by either the government alone (taxing), or in combination with another power (unions), is destructive of freedom and prosperity.The following statement by Sir Winston Churchill, upon leaving office as Prime Minister in 1945, was prophetic for Great Britain, and as it turns out, the United States and the world:
"I do not believe in the power of the State to plan and enforce. No matter how numerous are the committees they set up or the ever-growing hordes of officials they employ or the severity of the punishments they inflict or threaten, they can't approach the high level of internal economic production achieved under free enterprise. Personal initiative, competitive selection, and profit motive corrected by failure and the infinite processes of good housekeeping and personal ingenuity, these constitute the life of a free society. It is this vital creative impulse that I deeply fear the doctrines and policies of the socialist government has destroyed. Nothing that they can plan and order and rush around enforcing will take its place. They have broken the main spring and until we get a new one, the watch wil not go. Set the people free. Get out of the way and let them make the best of themselves. I am sure that this policy of equalizing misery and organizing society--instead of allowing diligence, self-interest and ingenuity to produce abundance--has only to be prolonged to kill this British Island stone dead."
In the early days of America's experiment in liberty, its Founders warned of oppressive regulation and taxation by those elected to represent the people. Under their "People's" Constitution, the people were left free, and the government was limited.
While Europe struggled with oppressive government intervention, the genius Founders of America recognized enduring truths about human nature, the human tendency to abuse power, and the possibilities of liberty for individuals. Richard Frothingham's 1872 "History of the Rise of the Republic of the United States," Page 14, contained the following footnote item on the condition of citizens of France:
"Footnote 1. M. de Champagny (Dublin Review, April, 1868) says of France, 'We were and are unable to go from Paris to Neuilly; or dine more than twenty together; or have in our portmanteau three copies of the same tract; or lend a book to a friend: or put a patch of mortar on our own house, if it stands in the street; or kill a partridge; or plant a tree near the road-side; or take coal out of our own land: or teach three or four children to read, . .. without permission from the civil government.'"
Clearly the government of France at that 1868 date laid an oppressive regulatory and tax burden on citizens, robbing them of their Creator-endowed liberty and enjoyment thereof. Frothingham observed that such coercive power constituted "a noble form robbed of its lifegiving spirit."
Great album by Soul Asylum, also.
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