Illinois regulators shut down 11-year-old selling cupcakes

Eleven-year-old Chloe Stirling is the type of young person you love if you're a normal person who appreciates the entrepreneurial instinct and enjoys seeing it come alive in America's youth. But she's the type of person you feel the need to rein in if you're a soulless bureaucrat who is on a mission to assert that we can't have people going around willy nilly doing things contrary to the properly established order of things.

The rules are the rules! And because people empowered to enforce the rules must do so always and everywhere so the people don't get out of line, Chloe's heretofore thriving business Hey, Cupcake! is now out of business. The Heritage Foundation's Foundry reports:

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Determined to save money for a car when she comes of age, Chloe baked, sold, and donated cupcakes for two years. She ran her business, called, “Hey, Cupcake!” out of her parents’ kitchen in Troy, Illinois. Ironically, it was Chloe’s success that got her in trouble. After a local paper lauded her creative cupcaking, the Madison County Health Department took notice and told her to close up shop. What were they thinking? Section 750.1360 of the Illinois Food Service Sanitation Code requires that a kitchen used for a “food service operation” must be separate from any “living areas,” including the family kitchen. Chloe’s mother, Heather Stirling, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that officials said that the family would need to buy a bakery or a separate kitchen for Chloe. Heather’s reaction says it all: “A separate kitchen? Who can do that?” Not our problem, say local officials. “The rules are the rules. It’s for the protection of the public health,” health department spokesperson Amy Yeager said, according to the Post-Dispatch. “The guidelines apply to everyone.”

You see this same sort of mindset in schools. If you're old enough, you can remember a time when kids on their birthdays used to bring cupcakes baked by their mothers to share with their classmates. That's over now. Schools always let parents know that nothing should be brought to class that wasn't commercially produced. It's certainly not because the pre-packaged stuff is better than the homemade stuff. It's because the first responsibility of any public school is to avoid litigation at all costs, and if Little Debbie made the snack cake instead of little Debbie's mom, the school is off the hook. The bureaucrat who forces 11-year-old Chloe Stirling out of business really doesn't care about the fact that the oven in the Stirlings' kitchen can bake cupcakes just as well as a commercial oven. The only thing that matters is that the rules are the rules, and the official authorities of Madison County have decided how things must be done. Some precocious 11-year-old has no business operating outside those rules, and she needs to get back in line and do the things that the important officials have deemed appropriate for 11-year-olds. The most galling thing here is that no one even filed a complaint against Chloe. Quite the contrary, people loved her cupcakes. The bureaucrats saw a story about her in the newspaper and took it upon themselves to butt in and shut her down. Why? Because they could, that's why. They are the heirs to Walter Peck, with all the common sense and twice the self-importance.