David McElroy

The citizens of Coralville, Iowa, are safe tonight from the scourge of unlicensed lemonade. The nationwide “War on Lemonade” never ends.

On the right is 4-year-old Abigail Krutsinger, who had the audacity to set up a table selling her own lemonade for 25 cents a cup.  She was caught red-handed with the merchandise and various lemonade paraphenalia. The police officer who came to shut Abigail down told her that a permit would cost $400 — far more than the $4 she had made.

I’ve covered this very recently, so I’m not going to belabor the point. Government agencies extort money from people who want to engage in voluntary transactions with other. It’s no different from the Mob demanding protection money.

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Every time there’s a wild binge of some sort, there comes a day of reckoning. For Americans, we might be seeing the first early warnings that it’s not far away.

In front of the Jefferson County Courthouse in Birmingham this morning, a couple dozen protesters picketed against proposed sewer rate increases in the county where I live. Rates have skyrocketed over the past decade because of billions of dollars that the county borrowed for the sewer system. Much of the money was lost to waste and fraud. Several politicians and contractors went to prison for their part in the massive fraud.

Explaining the full story would bore you silly, but it involves greedy local politicians, greedy contractors and slick NYC bankers who sold the county on making complicated and dangerous financial transactions that county officials didn’t really understand. (This PDF is the best summary I can find of how the debt accumulated.)

The county owes billions to the banks and is threatening to file a bankruptcy which would make the one Orange County, Calif., filed in 1994 pale in comparison. County sewer customers are angry about any proposal which would keep increasing their bills in order to give more and more money to the banks, so politicians are willing to pull the bankruptcy switch.

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In the wake of the story about Ronnie Bryant getting some national attention, Larry Downes of Indianapolis radio station WIBC interviewed me last Thursday. Listening to it reminds me of why I went into print journalism instead of broadcast. As talk radio host Ian Punnett frequently says, I have the face for radio and the voice for print.