County Shuts Down Kid’s Lemonade Stand; Fines Parents $500 is a news story of a kind that crops up pretty regularly; often, the popular dudgeon resulting leads to the bureaucrats’ backing off to duck the heat, while going right on squishing all the cases that don’t make the evening news.

But those same counties are much braver when it comes to upholding the folks who show up uninvited at vet’s funerals to to make as big and unpleasant a scene as possible at the dead soldier’s expense. For that, they send the cops to protect the activity, not to shut it down.

Isn’t there something wrong with that? Kids selling lemonade is  constructive and harmless. We have depended on entrepreneurs and they have to start somewhere. We don’t need folks exploiting others’ losses. But government uses the cops to shut off the kids and to protect the demonstrators. Somewhere, our values–and our laws–have gone into reverse.