Week in Review: The City Sunk Her

July 21, 2018

Kim O’Neil is a mom of two who desperately tried to comply with Chandler, Ariz., rules and regulations so she could keep her home-based business afloat. But none of Kim’s efforts were enough to satisfy the city, as Jarrett Dieterle and Shoshana Weissmann of the R Street Institute wrote in the Wall Street Journal this week. “She shut down her business, calling the episode ‘one of the most stressful experiences of my life,’” they explained.

Kim isn’t the only one who has been forced to jump through impossible government hoops in order to earn a living from home. As we’ve previously written, Angie Hall left her lucrative 16-year corporate career to better people’s lives through yoga and meditation—only to have the city of Phoenix turn her dream into a nightmare, putting her through an exhausting procedure that made it impossible for her to work from home.

Cities and counties nationwide are using outmoded zoning, licensing, and permit requirements to stifle home-based businesses, even when they’re unobtrusive and aren’t disrupting neighborhoods. This deprives people of economic opportunity and punishes responsible citizens.

Read more about the problem—and how it can be solved—on the Goldwater Institute’s In Defense of Liberty blog.

Liberty in the News

Property Rights Trampled:  $100,000 fines for renting out your home? You won’t believe what the city of Miami Beach is doing to homeowners. Meanwhile, San Diego has decided to join the big-government bandwagon and is the latest city to crack-down on home-sharing.

Donor Privacy Threatened:  Ideological harassment and intimidation is a well-documented and growing problem in our country. Looming on the horizon is the threat that donors to 501(c)(3) nonprofit groups will be exposed to scrutiny if their privacy is not protected. Unfortunately, a new rule change by the IRS does nothing to mitigate that threat.

Methadone and Mixed Messages: On the one hand, a physician licensed to prescribe narcotics can legally prescribe the powerful opioid methadone to patients suffering from severe, intractable pain. But that physician’s other hand is tied if she wants to prescribe the drug for other critically important uses. Jeffrey A. Singer, MD, a Visiting Fellow at the Goldwater Institute, explains why those mixed messages are making it difficult to treat addiction.