The three young girls – under the watchful eye of a nanny, sitting on the grass with them – explained that they had regular lemonade, raspberry lemonade, and small chocolate candy bars.
Then my brother asked how much each item cost.
“Oh, no,” they replied in unison, “they’re all free!”
I sat in the back seat in shock. Free? My brother questioned them again: “But you have to charge something? What should I pay for a lemonade? I’m really thirsty!”
His fiancee smiled and commented, “Isn’t that cute. They have the spirit of giving.”
That really set me off, as my regular readers can imagine.
“No!” I exclaimed from the back seat. “That’s not the spirit of giving. You can only really give when you give something you own. They’re giving away their parents’ things – the lemonade, cups, candy. It’s not theirs to give.”
I pushed the button to roll down the window and stuck my head out to set them straight.
“You must charge something for the lemonade,” I explained. “That’s the whole point of a lemonade stand. You figure out your costs – how much the lemonade costs, and the cups – and then you charge a little more than what it costs you, so you can make money. Then you can buy more stuff, and make more lemonade, and sell it and make more money.”
I’d swear it were Colbertian parody, but she seems to be serious.
She’s just using the lemonade stand story as a platform to make a vapid point about how nothing is “free” if the government is providing it. We pay for it via taxes.
That’s another thing … Ain’t nothing new for comedians to fabricate ridiculous situations in the pursuit of a punchline. But they rarely go with:
This column is a true story – every word of it.
And as the very lead.
Like, seriously … She and the fiancée sat in the car while the friend gets out to solicit some lemonade? She rolls down the window to harass some kids from the backseat of the car? Makes you sound like serious weirdos.
And if you have a rule about buying lemonade from kids simply to reward them for maintaining and entrepreneurial spirit, aren’t you contradicting the mechanisms of the free market? Is that not just another sort of charity? Shouldn’t the lemonade stand flourish or fail on its ability to address a demand, and not on the good will of the Benevolent Order of Capitalists?
Just some seriously wacky bullshit from people too invested in self-contradicting dogma.
Good gravy - it’s assholes like this that make me want to be a full-blown Marxist.
Well - I think the point being made was that they should purchase lemonade supplies from their parents and then turn around and sell the product at whatever markup they could get away with. I don’t think they were being encouraged to accept handouts from their parents. You know - teach the little buggers something about free-market capitalism.
The spirit once again quotes Scrooge, who asks if the grotesque children have “no refuge, no resource,” and the spirit retorts with Scrooge’s same words, “Are there no prisons, no workhouses?”, filling Scrooge with self-loathing.
If you’ve ever seen the Chicago Sun-Times, you know it’s the most backwards-ass provincial newspaper north of the Mason-Dixon line. It’s about Chicagoland above all, then about sports, then about TV, then buys assorted wire stories about the US and the world to fill some space. Its one-sentence paragraph style is for the absolute lowest class of reader.
I’ll never forget a day when the screaming hundred-point type on the cover of the Sun-Times anounced…PARKING CREATES COMMUTER WOES. Stop the fucking presses.
