What do the London riots and the recent government crackdowns on Lemonade stands across America have in common?

The answer is that in each case, government has done its best to control young people, to stop them engaging in enterprise. In Britain, the project is much more advanced. So if we want to know where the war on Lemonade selling ends up, we just have to look at the smashed windows and looted shops of Clapham Junction.

Let’s start in Britain so we can see where we’re going. The first thing to know is that government has removed the incentive to work. The British unemployment rate is currently 7.7%, yet there are over 100,000 households bringing in more than $37,000 annually in government handouts (the average household income in the UK). There are 650,000 households taking home more than $25,000 in these benefits.

That, however, is only part of the story. As that essential chronicler of British national demoralization, Theodore Dalrymple, said in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, employers are no longer interested in British youth:

The role of the minimum wage is crucial. It is around $10 per hour (slightly lower for 18-20 year olds), much higher than the US minimum of $7.25. The difference is all the more important when one considers that the US has a higher average income (around $42,000 annually), meaning that British employers are being asked to pay (roughly) over half of average wage as a minimum rather than a third in the US.


Minimum wage laws have therefore been the primary enemy of youth employment in Britain. Bluntly, why hire an untrained, unskilled youth with a sense of entitlement when you can hire an experienced, educated Pole hungry for work for the same price?

The situation is trending that way in the US as well. As Jeffrey Tucker of the Mises Institute says, the high teenage unemployment rate is alienating American youth from work.

As Tucker notes, the result is that more and more teens are choosing federally-subsidized college courses instead, ending up nevertheless in minimum-wage jobs but with massive debts (I discuss this phenomenon, and the resulting high salaries among public university educators and administrators in my book Stealing You Blind: How Government Fatcats Are Getting Rich Off of You). Indeed, one way for Obama to “solve” the youth unemployment problem could be by simply making college compulsory for people under 21. If you can force people to buy healthcare, why can’t you force them to attend college?

It is interesting that there were many students and graduates among the London rioters, surely a symptom of the same problem over there. Indeed, the recent riots followed riots by students (many of them female) not so long ago, incensed at the idea that they might have to pay for even some of their own education. British youth has been forced by state action to rely on the state for everything, and when the state starts to think again, they get angry.

That’s why the recent Lemonade stand crackdown is so worrying. The Lemonade stand is a cherished institution precisely because it helps teach the old virtues of enterprise, self-reliance and neighborhood. Yet, as one dad found when he inquired about how a stand could operate legally, the lesson now is that you must pay obeisance to bureaucracy above all:

Overweening government is destructive of all those virtues I just mentioned. It kills enterprise by insisting on box-checking and standards, destroys self-reliance by ensuring people look to bureaucracy first, and erodes neighborhood by its layers of ever-remoter officialdom. Of course, the cry in response is that government protects us and our children. We see how well that worked in Britain.

If we are not careful, we will sacrifice our children on the same altar to bureaucracy as our British cousins did. It is now time to take back government from the bureaucrats. A good start would be to help your kids set up a lemonade stand this Saturday, Lemonade Freedom Day. And if the authorities come to call, you can teach your children how government does not have their best interests at heart.

Like you, I've been horrified by the eruptions of mob violence around the globe this summer. But having spent the last two years researching and writing a book about mobs, I'm also grateful to the ruffians for taking to the streets so soon after my book was released.

Thanks, you dirty animals. I knew you wouldn't let me down.

When I decided to write about mobs, it was a relatively peaceful period. But as long as there is evil in the world, mobs will never be finally defeated. And as long as there are liberals, there will be some people stoking the mobs.

It was only a matter of time, although even I didn't expect it quite this soon.

Mobs are always the same -- destructive, left-wing and without any clear cause. Why were young people in Britain tearing apart their cities, burning down businesses and stealing electronics and designer clothes? Because the cops shot someone? Please.

What has gotten on the last nerve of rioters in Greece, Paris and Vancouver? They're jobless? Their government benefits have been cut? Their hockey team lost? They might as well destroy police cars because they're upset about rainy days. (That's not a suggestion, by the way -- more of a rhetorical flourish.)

Why were public sector union workers in Wisconsin busting up the capitol and physically attacking Republican legislators? MSNBC's Ed Schultz says it was because Republicans were trying to take away the people's "civil rights."

(Evidently, research showed the last seven people actually watching MSNBC were Wisconsin public school teachers.)

You have to do some digging to find out the public sector employees were upset that Republicans wanted government unions to engage in collective bargaining only over salary, but not work conditions or benefits -- all funded by the taxpayers.

Why were black and Hispanic gang members looting after the Rodney King verdict? As if you needed to know, a Los Angeles policeman recently told me that the gang members he arrested in the riots said they didn't know or care about Rodney King.

Why were masked hoodlums smashing Starbucks windows in Seattle a decade ago when some bankers came to town? They're against the "global economy"? What does that even mean?

Like Satan, mobs are good only for destruction and chaos. The putative "cause" is always incidental. As Jesus said, "They hated me without a cause."

The French Revolution is the template for all mob uprisings, and the signal event of that lunacy was an attack on a prison housing only half a dozen prisoners.

As best anyone can tell, the storming of the Bastille was instigated by a rumor that the laughably impotent King Louis XVI was about to stage an attack on the National Assembly. Or perhaps they were upset that the inept finance minister, Jacques Necker, had been fired. Or they thought the Bastille was an eyesore.

(The only other possible cause was recently ruled out when it was conclusively determined that France had no teachers unions in the late 18th century.)

No one is sure -- but a good time was had by all! Except the prison administrators murdered in the attack.

Liberals love mobs because rioting and anarchy is their path to power.

Making sound proposals based on facts and logic is not their metier. Issuing impossible promises to the easily fooled is their specialty. For more on this, see "The 2012 Democratic Platform."

The entire Democratic Party is currently promising to "save" Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in their present form. According to Obama's own Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, in less than 10 years, spending on those three entitlement programs, plus servicing the national debt, will consume 92 cents of every dollar in the federal budget.

The Democrats are openly lying to voters. It is a mathematical impossibility for these programs to continue without major reform now, or complete bankruptcy later -- and not very much later.

But Democrats' real achievement has been in destroying the family, and thereby creating an endless supply of potential rioters.

When blacks were only four generations out of slavery, their illegitimacy rate was about 23 percent (lower than the white illegitimacy rate is now). Then Democrats decided to help them! Barely two generations since LBJ's Great Society programs began, the black illegitimacy rate has tripled to 72 percent.

Meanwhile, the white illegitimacy rate has septupled, from 4 percent to 29 percent.

Instead of a "War on Poverty," it should have been called a "War on the Family."

The vast and permanent underclass created by the welfare state is a great success story for the Democratic Party, which now has a loyal constituency of deadbeats who automatically vote for the Democrats to keep their Trojan horse "benefits" flowing.

It's the Democrats' "heroin dealer" model of government.

Apparently, it takes a lot of government workers to minister to the poor, inasmuch as government employment has skyrocketed in tandem with the family's disintegration. As long as Democrats are serving their principal constituency -- recipients of taxpayer money -- they don't care what happens to the rest of society.

They champion any mob that will increase their political power. Liberals promote welfare dependency, class warfare, endless government programs staffed with public sector workers, street protests, coddling criminals and physical attacks on their ideological opponents. This is how they create reliable Democratic voters.

True, government employees are doing jobs we don't want done, can never be fired, are bankrupting the country and periodically break out in mob violence.

True, also, that the children of broken families sometimes burn city blocks to the ground or kill their great-grandmothers with swords. But what a voting bloc!