As a service to their local community, preschoolers attending the Little Ones Learning Center in Forest Park, Georgia, located just outside of Atlanta, run a farm stand that provides fresh fruits and vegetables at affordable prices to residents in an area that some would describe as a food "desert" – or at least they did until the city suddenly decided to shut them down for alleged "zoning violations."
According to reports, the bi-monthly farm stand program, which often sold its produce at "generous discounts" to people with low incomes or on food stamps, is no longer in operation because city officials say that the spot where it was located isn't zoned for "commercial" uses. Consequently, the farm stand now has to operate inside the school, where it receives far less sales due to the fact that many local residents and passersby don't even know it's there.
After considerable public backlash over the decision, Forest Park officials offered Little Ones a different spot to set up its farm stand in another part of town. But this other spot is very far from the preschool and its surrounding neighborhood, which is home to many of the people who frequented the farm stand for fresh produce.
These same city officials have also offered to let the Little Ones farm stand stay in its old spot, but with one major caveat: The preschoolers would have to fork over $50 per day to the city to be granted a "special event" permit – an amount that, over time, would make the farm stand completely unviable, causing it to potentially go bankrupt.
"Anywhere you live, you've got to have rules and regulations," insists Forest Park City Manager Angela Redding, as quoted by local media. "Otherwise, you would just have whatever."
"Whatever" is code for freedom, which central planners hate
This type of situation has happened before, on many different occasions, in fact. Back in 2011, as one example, a children's lemonade stand near Bethesda, Maryland, was shuttered by local authorities for not having the proper "permit" to do "business" in that location.
The children who ran this lemonade stand were actually threatened with fines of up to $500 per day for violating this forced shutdown, as Montgomery County officials made sure to throw their weight around in a show of police state force against these innocent kids.
Despite claiming that such tactics are necessary to maintain "order," government officials who engage in such tyranny are really just trying to keep the boot pressed firmly down on freedom and opportunity. This is what Angela Redding meant when she used the term "whatever" to describe the philosophy behind Forest Park's shutdown of the Little Ones farm stand.
"That 'whatever' is exactly the hope and promise that irks central planners," explains Zero Hedge.
"Whatever symbolizes what is possible when individuals and organizations spontaneously create new streams of value for their neighbors. Whatever are opportunities for mutual gain through voluntary exchange. Whatever are new inventions, new services, and new ways of living and being that augment our existence and improve our future. Whatever is freedom."
As it turns out, this is what so-called "central planning" is all about: the elimination of all the "whatevers" from society that are getting in the way of central planners' visions for creating "utopian" societies that are free from pesky produce pop-up stands, which don't have "permission" to exist unless the government says so.
"We should be outraged when young entrepreneurs are prohibited from producing and selling something of value to their neighbors due to restrictive regulations that centralize power and weaken neighborhood dynamism," Zero Hedge goes on to explain.
For more related news about America's massive government overreach problem, be sure to check out PoliceState.news.
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