Food Fight! (libertarian law firm style)
By: Steve Grumm
“Your municipal bureaucracy shall not come between me and my Korean BBQ taco food truck!” is something George Orwell never said. But if Orwell, whose thinking has for years been strongly influential in libertarian circles, were here today….who knows?
Here’s a great Washington Post article, “In food truck fights, libertarian law firm takes a stand,” about the efforts of the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public interest firm, to stand up against what it views as over-regulation of food carts/trucks.
[The Institute] launched its new National Street Vending Initiative early this year in Texas and has since expanded it to Atlanta (where city officials had decided to reserve all public property for a single vending company) and Chicago (where aldermen have proposed rules so severe, they could cut off vending in the entire downtown area). The institute even released a report, “Streets of Dreams,” which reviews vending regulations in the country’s 50 largest cities, including Washington.
I’d need to know more about the regulatory ins and outs to form an opinion, but since soft pretzels are a food group to me, my heart (and stomach) stand with the vendors.
