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Commentary: On entrepreneurship and shrubbery

By: David Ziemer, [email protected]//August 23, 2010//

Commentary: On entrepreneurship and shrubbery

By: David Ziemer, [email protected]//August 23, 2010//

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I am intrigued by the saga of two students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who have run afoul of the law by running a liquor delivery service.

Apparently, students would place an order for alcohol on a website called campusdrank.com, and for a $2 added charge, the liquor would be delivered to them.

In a civilized society, this would be called providing a valuable service to paying customers. Any attempt to impede the operation would be deemed an interference with liberty of contract, and thus, both a crime and a mortal sin.

But we don’t live in a civilized society that guarantees liberty of contract; we live in Wisconsin.

So, the entrepreneurs face more than $400,000 in fines.

That’s only part of the story, though. The students claim they set up the operation in reliance on statements by a Madison alderman that the operation was legal, and intend to sue the city for any penalties they incur.

Inasmuch as the prosecution of the students is the real crime here, and not the conduct underlying the prosecution, I wish them luck.

But, they face an uphill battle, because of the general doctrine that a governmental body is not bound by the acts of its agents. Or, as private attorneys explain the doctrine to their clients: government officers must be presumed to be stupid, useless, and corrupt; rely on them wholly at your own risk.

Assuming the students’ version of the case is true, they are guilty only of relying on the word of someone who works for the government, and not being more discrete about their operation.

They could have learned a thing or two from a model of discretion I used to know who ran a similar operation 20 years ago in Washington, D.C. His name was Screwy Louie.

Screwy Louie lived in a basement apartment on the north side of Pennsylvania Avenue. From that prestigious address, he sold rotgut vodka to the derelicts (or as they were known to homeless advocates back then, “victims of the Reagan tax cuts”).

Late one night, I was talking to three victims of the Reagan tax cuts, who all slept nearby in a small park on the property of George Washington University: Billy Beach, Crazy Ray, and Richard (I don’t know why Richard didn’t have a nickname like the others).

Billy Beach told me that Screwy Louie wanted to start a garden, and that, if he could uproot and deliver one of the arbor vitae that had been recently planted in the park, Screwy Louie would give him a pint of vodka. But, Billy Beach said, he wasn’t strong enough to do that.

But I was. So, I squatted down and uprooted an arbor vitae, carried it across Pennsylvania Avenue, and traded it to Screwy Louie, so that Billy Beach could drink a bottle of rotgut vodka.

Needless to say, the bottle didn’t last long amongst the victims of the Reagan tax cuts, so I repeated this procedure twice more, until finally, Screwy Louie said he didn’t want any more shrubbery.

Assuming that union labor was used to plant the arbor vitae, I estimate I deprived the university of $600 worth of plant life, so that Billy Beach and his friends could drink $6 worth of vodka.

As far as I know, Screwy Louie is still selling rotgut on Pennsylvania Avenue. And folks that homeless advocates now refer to as “victims of the Bush tax cuts” are still buying it.

The lesson for university students and other would-be entrepreneurs in the gray economy is simple: it is much more discreet to steal greenery and carry it across the same street on which the President of the United States resides than to advertise valuable services on the Internet.

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