…with government regulations:
A big part of our success are the hundreds of parents — both consignors and shoppers — who voluntarily work brief shifts to help set up before the sale starts. In exchange, these parents get to shop first with more choices and better merchandise.
In January, though, the Department of Labor noticed all this cooperation going on. Months later, investigators concluded that volunteers are “employees” under the Fair Labor Standards Act.
This means paying the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, filling out IRS paperwork and complying with who-knows-what other rules. And all for a pop-up business that lasts days.
Think about that for a second. I’ve offered regular parents the same opportunities that eBay gives independent resellers. When I do it in the real world to recycle used clothes, the Department of Labor says no way. That’s bunk. My volunteers are not employees or independent contractors. They’re customers.
By this dreadful logic, Build-a-Bear Workshop employs child labor when it lets its young customers assemble their own teddy bears.
Unfortunately, as my situation shows, too many new ideas are being held back by rules that are stuck in the past. When the Fair Labor Standards Act was written in 1938, nobody was imagining a collaborative, social business like mine. And I’m far from the only entrepreneur stifled by outmoded dictates from a world I never lived in.
You’re not allowed to freely cooperate or exchange without the permission of the State, citizen.
[Update a while later]
Tocqueville would have been saddened, but perhaps not surprised:
Tocqueville would not recognize America today. Indeed, so completely has associational life collapsed, and so enormously has the state grown, that he would be forced to conclude that, at some point between 1833 and 2013, France must have conquered the United States.
…[He] also foresaw exactly how this regulatory state would suffocate the spirit of free enterprise: “It rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces [the] nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.”
Except the government is not a shepherd — it is becoming the wolf, against which we need sheepdogs.
Tocqueville didn’t foresee–and would have been deeply saddened by–a nation of authority-defying individualists turning into a nation of Gerribs and Jims, licking the jackboot that grinds them into the dust and kissing the hand that holds the whip.
More laws means more people that otherwise wouldn’t become lawbreakers.
For the poor, the underground economy is almost complete. I don’t get involved with it, but I see it everywhere. Little old ladies buying food with a half dozen food stamp debit cards, none of which they got directly. When I ran a garage years ago, buying back my own tools was a weekly occurrence. Uh well, so I guess I was involved in it, sort of.
I wish I had the income of some of these people without jobs.
This is all part of the progressive agenda to implement what I call Hall Pass America. Nobody gets to do anything of consequence without asking permission of some good progressive bureaucrat first. And, as the thing a bureaucrat hates most is anything that doesn’t fit the existing book of rules and regulations, anyone wanting to do anything new will get landed on with both hob-nailed bureaucratic boots. This nonsense needs to be stop-punched before it goes any further, then rolled back. Next big opportunity would seem to be November 2014.
“This is all part of the progressive agenda to implement what I call Hall Pass America. Nobody gets to do anything of consequence without asking permission of some good progressive bureaucrat first.”
Hall-Monitor Jim asks: “You make that sound like a bad thing.”
The problem with sheepdogs is that their ancestors were wolves.
The only jobs that bureaucrats care about are their own. They write new regulations every year to justify their jobs and to expand the bureaucracy. When private sector jobs are destroyed as a result, well, then the unemployed people may end up on welfare, thus creating new bureaucrat jobs.