Given its surplus of violence and scarcity of resources, Chicago surely has bigger things to worry about than the menace, as the city sees it, of Laura Pekarik’s cupcakes. Herewith redundant evidence of regulatory government’s unsleeping solicitousness for the strong.
Pekarik, a feisty 33-year-old single mother and embodiment of America’s entrepreneurial itch, grew up in Chicago’s suburbs and at age 24 began baking for the fun of it. Eventually, she invested her entire savings ($12,000) in a green truck, called Cupcakes for Courage, from which she began selling.
She was part of the proliferation of truck-dispensed foods that grew in response to consumer demand for the fun and convenience of curbside lunches of all sorts. This was, however, neither fun nor convenient for restaurants, which responded by (guess one): (a) upping their game in order to compete with the upstarts in trucks or (b) running to the government for relief from competition. If you guessed “b,” you get an A for understanding the land of the free and the home of the rent-seekers.
Rent-seeking is private factions manipulating public power to enhance their profits. This is what Chicago’s restaurant industry did, with the help of an alderman who owns several restaurants. In 2012, at their behest, the city revised its vending laws to forbid food trucks from operating within 200 feet of any business that serves food (with fines of up to $2,000), which banned the trucks from almost all areas with office workers seeking lunches. And the regulations require food trucks to install GPS devices so government can track their movements.
