Woman Fined for Feeding Hungry Children

Angela Prattis's church is behind her summer project of feeding needy children. Unfortunately, her town council is not. They want the lady to pay for the privilege of serving food, supplied by her church, to children who (at least claim that they) would not otherwise get balanced meals.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/im-not-stopping-penn-woman-faces-600-daily-fine-for-feeding-hungry-children/

Sometimes I think that what we really need is a constitutional amendment forbidding any attempt to enact or enforce any law against any behavior that does not materially harm someone else. The town council should be paying a fine to support Ms. Prattis's work.

Attention, local lurkers. This is where having zoning ordinances leads. The current elected officials always tell voters "Oh, no, we'd never let anything like this happen in Scott County, Virginia," or wherever. Then ten years later, since the mechanism for corruption is there, ready to be used, somebody uses it. Some rich greedhead leans on a council member. "I'll give $1000 to your campaign if you'll use the zoning ordinance to keep anybody in my neighborhood from opening a restaurant that would compete with mine." (Or, in the Pennsylvania case, maybe "if you'll enforce a zoning ordinance that will discourage people of a certain genetic type from being in my neighborhood at all"?) The council member caves in...and the next thing we hear is that some decent fellow's being run out of town because an injury preventing him from finishing a home repair project, or some church lady's being penalized for feeding hungry people.

The only safe way to avoid this kind of abominations is to declare the entire town or county a "Free Enterprise Zone" where people can do anything they jolly well want to do with their own property unless someone can prove that they're doing harm to others. That kind of law won't interfere with the enforcement of laws against smoking cigarettes, selling illegal drugs, or keeping 35 dogs in a 12x20' yard and never cleaning the yard...but it will interfere with the use of laws to harass church ladies.