Stories of street vendors being forced out of business by uniformed thugs are becoming depressingly familiar. The past few days have been an especially bad time for the poor attempting to make an honest but extralegal living.
In the Zambian capital Lusaka, riot police have been called in to force vendors off the street, confiscate their merchandise, and demolish their stalls. City officials cite the nuisance of vendors blocking the streets and the harm to shop owners as reasons for the eviction, insisting that the hawkers have nothing to complain about, since they’ve been built a nice special-purpose reservation market.
The destruction was even more transparent in Ghana when vendors turned up for a day of business in Kumasi, only to find government officials setting their stalls on fire. Past “decongestion exercises” had been unsuccessful in ridding the streets of hawkers, and the city has set up a special tribunal to quickly prosecute vendors refusing to “voluntarily” move along.
As I’ve said before, street vending and other forms of informal work are an important outlet for the entrepreneurial spirit of the poor. People, left to interact voluntarily, will claw their way out of the gutter by providing valuable services to others. As is often the case, the state is acting as the enemy of the poor.
Brad Taylor is a graduate student in Political Science at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. He blogs at 
The shop owners and also the (non-vendor) street users have a legitimate complaint about the street becoming congested by street vendors. the remedy is to abolish government owned streets.
The problem is that without market prices it’s impossible to know whether the annoyance to those who don’t like vendors is significant enough to outweigh the benefits to vendors and their customers. It’s unclear whether crowded streets are any stronger grounds for complaint than, say, the displeasure a non-smoker gets from walking past a smoker outdoors. My suspicion is that vendors do much more good than harm.
Dear Brothers and Sisters, Sons and Daughters of Liberty,
There are only two types of human beings.
One type just wants everyone to leave everyone else alone and these humans are students and advocates of the Philosophically Mature Non-Aggression Principle.
The other type refuses to leave others alone and these humans are the Mobocracy Looter Minions with their hords of bureaucrats, jackboots, and mercenaries that perpetuate the perpetration of the loot and booty gravy-train. Rob-peter-to-buy-paul’s-vote bread and circuses of the doomed Amerikan Empire.
You are either the one…or the other.
The John Galt Solution of Starving The Monkeys is the only solution. Stop funding and forging your own chains and shackles. What are you leaving for your children and grandchildren and prodigy!?!
The Mobocracy Looter Minions must be allowed to consume everything around them, then each other, and finally themselves. There is no other way. Ayn Rand wrote about it over fifty years ago and it rings as soundly today as it did then.
Get your copy of Starving The Monkeys by Tom Baugh today, before the book is banned and the author is hunted down and Vince Fostered!
Sincerely,
John and Dagny Galt
Atlas Shrugged, Owner’s Manual For The Universe!(tm)
http://www.starvingthemonkeys.com/
http://voluntaryist.com/fundamentals/introduction.php
.
No spam, please!
Rob is the king of that kind of spam. Despite you kindly asking him to stop, he’ll probably do it again. I doubt he read your response to his “comment” (if he even read the article) which I’ve seen him copy and paste all over the libertarian blogosphere lately.
Anyway, this is not confined to the so-called 3rd world, there’s a lawsuit recently filed by the Institute for Justice on behalf of a street vendor in Washington state over a law that required him to get his brick and mortar competitor’s permission to do business on the street!
Check it out: http://www.reason.com/blog/show/136127.html