Bureaucrats Stamp Out Acts of Kindness

No good deed goes unpunished, thanks to Big Government:

A chef in Decatur, Illinois, dared to serve food to the homeless without permission from the government, so armed police and health inspectors stormed into his house and seized his professional cooking equipment. …

To be very clear, [Khemuel “Chef”] Sanders has a food handler’s license. That is to say, he has already paid the state for permission to prepare food. That in and of itself is tyrannical, but that the cops and the food police would raid his house and take his cooking utensils into custody is so far beyond the pale that the pale isn’t even visible anymore.

You can’t see the pale in Los Angeles either, and not because of the smog:

Last September, city government shut down an operation that was providing tiny houses to the homeless in Los Angeles. Senior Assistant City Attorney Valerie Flores explained why her office couldn’t allow just anyone to offer shelter to people living on the street. “Most cities have very strict building codes to make sure that any structure approved have the bare minimum access to safe electricity, ventilation and water,” she said. “From what I’ve seen of these structures, they don’t meet current safety standards.”

Presumably sleeping on the sidewalk, as an exploding number of people do in Los Angeles, meets current safety standards.

Then, Flores doubled down on the despotism, declaring that even if an individual had one of these structures on private property, it would still be seized as it would likely not pass municipal code muster.

At least we can be grateful that there still is such a thing as private property — in theory, for now.

Greg Schiller of Chicago let homeless people get out of the bitter cold by sleeping in his garage. Authorities found out and wouldn’t allow it. So he let people sleep in the basement. Authorities told him to knock it off or they would condemn his house.

Charity is now a government operation, conducted strictly on a coercive basis. Interlopers from the shrinking realm of voluntary action will not be permitted.

On a tip from Greg O.