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This is a symptom of our society's "entrepreneurial decay."
Zachary Slayback
by Zachary Slayback
On Saturday, July 23rd, Alison Ettel called police on a young girl selling water without a permit in Oakland, CA. The girl’s relative caught a video of Ettel, tweeted it out, and an Internet rage mob had identified her and her business within hours.
Twitter quickly dubbed the then-unidentified woman in the video #PermitPatty.
The video is frustrating. It starts midway through an altercation with Permit Patty, a grown woman more than capable of remonstrating with a child, on the phone with what one assumes is the Oakland Police Department. Upon seeing herself filmed, she ducks behind a brick wall until the seller’s cousin confronts her personally.
(Ettel has since claimed that she was only “pretending” to call the police and did so after an altercation with the girl’s mother.)
Most of the discussion around #PermitPatty (and her metaphorical accomplice, #BBQBecky, another Oakland woman who called police on a black man using a charcoal grill in a public park) focuses on the racial element at play. Patty and Becky are well-educated white women calling the police on black people committing what are, at-best, nonviolent infractions of municipal code.
Permit Patty may be a racist, I don’t know.
She is indicative of a deeper and less-obvious problem in American society. This deeper problem comes from years of cultural and economic stagnation, decades of drilling a permission-based mindset into the lives of young Americans, and a slow decay of American civil society.
Permit Patty is a symptom of entrepreneurial decay. That we live in a world where it is at all normalized for a grown woman to call the police on a young business owner should give us pause to stop and think about how we got here.
Entrepreneurship Builds Civil Society
I’ve written before about how, contrary to popular belief, entrepreneurship among younger generations is declining, despite it never before being technologically easier to get started on a business. Too much debt, too much stifling, industrialized schooling, and too few role models for entrepreneurial activity all create this environment.
It’s easy to stop and say, “too many busybodies like #PermitPatty, too.” But that gets the cycle backwards. Permit Patty is just a symptom of a society in which entrepreneurship (especially street markets and especially youth entrepreneurship) is so rare that somebody can stop and think, “does this person have a permit?”
That some people rush to Permit Patty’s defense is another sign of this entrepreneurial and civil decay.
In a healthy market culture, racial, political, religious, and ethnic differences disappear into the cosmopolitanism of the marketplace, at least for the duration of the exchange. Jane Jacobs (ironically, Permit Patty has an Urban Planning degree) wrote about the evolutionary and cooperative nature of commercial morals in her book Systems of Survival. Essentially, Jacobs says, there are two broad systems of morals and ethics that govern behavior. The first is commercial in nature and results in people putting their differences aside for mutually beneficial exchange. The second is governing in nature and results in policing measures. She called these the commercial and guardian systems.
The commercial system arises wherever you have healthy and functioning marketplaces (including black markets). Even in countries and societies deeply divided along racial, political, religious, or ethnic lines, people put aside their differences when they get to the market.
Problems start when these two systems needlessly bleed into each other. Dirty cops start working with the mob and taking bribes. Businesspeople turn to the heavy hand of the regulatory state to crush their competitors. The force that defines the guardian system replaces the cooperation and healthy competition that defines the commercial system. Without the healthy competition and cooperation that define the commercial system, people defer to the guardian system, involving the police in matters that formerly would have been dealt with through negotiation, remonstration, and debate, with force as a last resort.
In a functioning community with the commercial and guardian systems in check, it wouldn’t matter if Permit Patty were a racist. Even if she wanted to do something about a little back girl selling water, the norm of turning to the regulatory state to shut down a small business owner over a permit wouldn’t exist. Instead, the commercial norm would be to ask the business owner how she insures that her water is clean and how customers can hold her accountable if the water isn’t clean. If they don’t get a good answer, they go on their way. They don’t call the police to shut down the stand.
That Permit Pattys and others shutting down children's’ small businesses continues to plague the news cycle (and that police enforce these shutdowns) shows a need to rebuild commercial society.
How You Can Rebuild Commercial Society
Rebuilding commercial society doesn’t start with congressional legislation or edicts from on high. It starts with re-establishing norms that reward starting a business and make it easy to explore. Doing that can mean changing regulations at the local level. Most people, though, can start by supporting young business owners, deferring to informal institutions for dispute resolution, and making it easier to start a business.
Supporting young business owners doesn’t look like signing up for a youth mentorship program or donating to Junior Achievement (those are fine if you enjoy them). It means buying a cup of lemonade from the local stand, hiring your neighbor’s son to shovel snow from your driveway, and putting up with a kid going around door-to-door to sell something. At the very least, it means not calling the cops on a lemonade stand or on an unsupervised child.
If you do have a dispute with a business owner, whether a child selling water on a hot summer day or a neighborhood business, don’t automatically defer to taking your dispute to the city council. That’s worse than being the guy who yells at a restaurant manager that you’re giving him one star on Yelp because he didn’t immediately do what you wanted. Start by rediscovering the lost art of negotiation, air your grievances and let the business owner know that you aren’t unreasonable and could be open to changing your mind. In other words, if you don’t want to live in a society of busybodies who use the police for small grievances, don’t be a busybody who uses the police for small grievances.
Finally, give people real options to explore starting a business. If you’re a parent and your child wants to start a business instead of focusing on extracurricular activities, let him. If you have a friend who wants to launch a business and you know somebody who can help her do that, offer to connect the two. If you are a business owner and a young person wants to shadow or interview you to learn about your business, be open to the invitation.
In a healthy civil and entrepreneurial society, it wouldn’t matter if Permit Patty were a racist. Rebuilding that society starts on the individual level.
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Zachary Slayback
Zachary Slayback
Zak is a communicator focusing on issues of education, innovation, and social change. He’s the author of the 2016 Amazon best-seller, The End of School: Reclaiming Education from the Classroom and is currently finalizing The Little Guide to Learning Anything. He regularly speaks on issues of learning, social change, innovation, and the changing jobs landscape. He is a founding team member at Praxis.
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WASHINGTON — When Jared Kushner hosted a high-profile summit meeting on federal prison reform at the White House last Friday, some in attendance noticed that the man who was ostensibly in charge of the federal prison system, Mark S. Inch, a retired Army major general, was nowhere in sight.
Only Mr. Kushner and a few others knew that Mr. Inch, a genial former military police commander appointed to oversee the Federal Bureau of Prisons and its more than 180,000 inmates just nine months ago, had two days earlier submitted his resignation as the bureau’s director to Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein.
By the time President Trump entered the East Room, Mr. Inch had already been ordered to vacate his office and had begun packing up books and memorabilia from his 35-year military career.
Mr. Inch told Mr. Rosenstein he was tired of the administration flouting “departmental norms.” And he complained that Attorney General Jeff Sessions had largely excluded him from major staffing, budget and policy decisions, according to three people with knowledge of the situation. Mr. Inch also felt marginalized by Mr. Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, in drafting prison reform legislation, the officials said.
He found himself caught in an ideological turf war between Mr. Kushner and Mr. Sessions. Mr. Kushner has championed reforms to the corrections system and more lenient federal sentencing, and Mr. Sessions, a law-and-order conservative and former Alabama attorney general, has opposed significant parts of the bipartisan prison reform bill that Mr. Kushner backs, according to officials.
Mr. Kushner, with the president’s support, has been pushing prison reform legislation meant to reduce recidivism by incentivizing inmates — with the possibility of early release to halfway houses or home confinement — to take part in job training and other rehabilitation programs.
Early in the administration, Mr. Kushner and Mr. Sessions came to an agreement, according to a former administration official involved in their talks. Mr. Kushner would press ahead with prison reforms but avoid a politically divisive issue he cared even more strongly about, sentencing reform, which the attorney general and Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, both adamantly oppose.
But Mr. Sessions, not Mr. Kushner, controls the prison bureau. And he has quietly worked to ensure that any reforms that might be seen as excessively lenient toward inmates are put into place only after time-consuming study, according to officials.
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The departure of Mark S. Inch creates a vacuum at a time when the Federal Bureau of Prisons is grappling with an existential crisis over workplace harassment and other issues.CreditU.S. Army
The departure of Mr. Inch, who tried to navigate a middle course, creates a vacuum at a time when the bureau is grappling with an existential crisis over issues about workplace harassment, violence, gang activity, sentencing fairness and the funding of rehabilitation programs.
“It’s disappointing,” said Jack Donson, director of case management and programs for FedCure, a nonprofit advocacy group for federal inmates. “The bureau finally gets someone from outside the culture who can, maybe, clean things out and within nine months he’s been railroaded out the door.”
But some see Mr. Inch’s exit as an opening for Mr. Trump to take a more sweeping approach that would include sentencing reform — one of the few issues that offer him a chance for the kind of big, bipartisan deal he promised during the 2016 campaign.
“The rap against General Inch is that he wasn’t a real reformer. In that sense, his departure is an opportunity,” said Kevin Ring, president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, a Washington-based advocacy organization that is broadly supportive of Mr. Kushner’s reform efforts.
“There’s a real struggle going on now about whether or not to reform the bureau, and it was increasingly clear that he wasn’t in a position to reform that agency.”
A newcomer to the federal prison system, Mr. Inch never found his footing, according to interviews with current and former bureau employees. And he struggled to publicly explain his department’s response to complaints of sexual harassment, violence and staffing problems inside the system.
Internally he was marginalized, cut out of budgetary decisions and largely excluded from discussion of the prison reform bill backed by Mr. Kushner, which passed the House on Tuesday but faces an uphill battle in the Senate.
Mr. Kushner had already come to view Mr. Inch as less a policy peer than an employee. This month, he summoned Mr. Inch and two federal wardens to the White House and demanded that they ease access to volunteer groups, including evangelical ministries and Jewish organizations, in federal prisons, according to two people familiar with the exchange.
Prison reform is an issue of particular interest to Mr. Kushner. In 2005, his father, Charles Kushner, was sentenced to two years in prison after pleading guilty to 18 counts of tax evasion, witness tampering and making illegal campaign donations. He served 14 months in a federal prison camp in Alabama and then was sent to a halfway house in New Jersey. He was released in August 2006.
But the bill favored by Mr. Kushner has been criticized by some prison reform advocates as impractical — in part because of a lack of available beds in halfway houses. The prison bureau decided last year not to renew contracts with a number of halfway house providers.
And in a May letter to the House Judiciary Committee, the N.A.A.C.P., along with more than 70 organizations, urged lawmakers to vote no on the legislation, explaining that any effort to pass prison reform without including sentencing reform would “not meaningfully improve the federal system.” The union that represents federal prison workers has also vocally opposed the bill.
At the White House meeting last Friday, Mr. Trump said he would sign the bill if lawmakers could get it to his desk. “Prison reform is an issue that unites people from across the political spectrum. It’s an amazing thing,” he said.
For now, the Bureau of Prisons will be run by its former assistant director, Hugh J. Hurwitz, a career bureau official. Mr. Sessions was taken by surprise when Mr. Inch resigned and has not begun his search for a permanent successor, according to a Justice Department official.
Glenn Thrush reported from Washington, and Danielle Ivory from New York.
Many years ago, Levi resisted attempts to change the name of the group to; "Levi Stubbs and the Tops" and he also refused to sign solo record deals. He was also Berry Gordy's first choice to play the part of Louis McKay, opposite Diana Ross in the motion picture; "Lady Sings the Blues" (The part went to Billie Dee Williams) but he turned it down because no parts were offered to other members of the group. In addition, he stayed married to the same woman his entire life. Mr. Levi Stubbs was a great man.
I'm going to have to shift gears and start publishing my blog some. "You've said that before Thomson, it's about time you took your own advice and "Hop to it."
Move over Cubs, there's a new Cinderella in town. McGaw Hall is old having been built in 1952. I pointed out to my friend at the game last night some badly worn areas that desperately needed a paint job. However, everybody who cares and there aren't many may have to take notice if NU makes the Big Show this year in the NCAA Tournament. They are 6 and 2 and a half game out of 1st and 17 and 4 overall. I was aghast that it has been almost 30 years since I last worked at NU. I should have stayed there. Big mistake to leave when I could have earned a degree. There aren't many who can go from Marion to Northwestern. Well, to late to cry about that now.
A man came to me one time and as we had developed a rapport over a few years time he asked me to keep an eye on his camel over night. To which I said, sure. Along with the camel was a mule, whose name I don't remember, the camel's name was Sebastian. As it was they had a dispute in the middle of the night and having obviously not been raised to keep their feet to themselves displayed some aggressiveness and a few indistinguishable verbal assaults to match. The following morning a neighbor came by all awash at the thought "who could leave a camel out in the wild of Evanston over night to fend for itself, and LOOK, they didn't even leave any water." I looked at the women calmly, or so I thought because I have been told I don't have a 'calm' look. I said; "you do know, that's a camel, don't you?" Remember there is no educational value to the second kick in the head from a mule. Now there are people out there who are so hard headed that no amount of mule kicks are going to get their attention For most of us anyway we are going to get another day to do this all over again. We call that tomorrow, tomorrow., it's only a day a way. Let's face it, Abe Vigoda will not get a tomorrow and you may not either. You might be coming home from work as I was one night when on the El at this very same late hour 4 boisterous college students from Loyola were returning from some apparent party of festivity and were enjoying themselves immensely. The man at the other end of the car didn't appreciate the gaiety of these young men, and in a slurring dialect I'll describe as drunk he said as much and threatened to beat them about the head and shoulders if they didn't shut up. Oh, and he threw in something to the effect that he was a policeman, a very drunk policeman, well he said he was a policeman, but he was drunk. I in my box seat fully paid for observed the episode taking place with somewhat delight. My cue would come later when the drunken man was going to go down there and show them what ever it was that he was going to show them. As the barreling dirvish of staggered toward the other end of the car I stood up and blocked his path, Providing him with my ID that said I worked for the Illinois Department of Corrections, and I bluffed an authoritative "I'm a Cop too." Where is your ID? He didn't seem to have his with him. I told him to sit down and let them kids alone. After the students departed the EL and as we pulled into Howard Mr Drunk started stirring again and suggesting how he ought to hit me in the nose. I told him Come on Down. But he harmlessly left the car and vanished into the night. I got to thinking Accounting comes with a lot less drama and more decent hours I need to get a job at Northwestern.
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