Dear All;
A couple days ago I sent the AP article about LA banning new fastfood places in Southern Central LA. Slate came out with this incisive commentary about that stupidity. What happens next? Will the LA Council ban new fancy restaurants in Beverly Hills because there aren't enough grocery stores offering organic health foods? Doh! Health Nazis dictating what a person should eat aren't any different than Morality Nazis dictating laws imposing morality on sex - drugs - alcohol - and rock and roll.
Let the market place determine what business opens where charging prices the market will bear with customers coming on in if the products and prices suits their wallets. Secondly, what about the employment opportunities for the South Central LA? How many people does it require to staff a fast food place say 16 hours a day? How many people staff a small white table restaurant for 12 hours - lunch and dinner cooks busboys servers? Unless enough space is made to have at least 100 tables with a really decent turn rate on those tables for lunch and dinner the restaurant is guaranteed to fail.
http://www.slate.com/id/2196397/?GT1=38001
The LA City Council and its actions are nothing more than the War On Those In Poverty with its unintended consequences. The poor are ghettoized by government policies from land-use, zoning, and building codes that restrict low-cost housing to poverty "reservations." Politically induced regulations for licenses, permits, and labor codes anti-competitively hamper opening a business or getting employed. For more on the War on Those In Poverty see my op-ed:
http://ca.lp.org/lp20080303.shtml
Get the 500 lb government monkey off the backs of the poor - the sooner the better and this includes repealing all income and payroll taxes for anyone earning under the Federal poverty guidelines. Then repeal minimum wage laws and prevailing wage laws. And repeal employers hiring the poor from matching social security and medicare payroll taxes which together takes $.10 cents on the dollar for each dollar of payroll. You have a small business payroll of $250,000 look at $25,000 in payroll taxes excluding workers compensation.
Ron Getty - SF Libertarian
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