A few years ago in Overton, Texas, police shut down a lemonade and kettlecorn stand run by two sisters, ages seven and eight.
Their crime: no permit.
The girls were trying to raise money to take their dad to Splash Kingdom for Father's Day, and the city informed them they'd need a permit and a peddler's license to keep selling. Cost of the permit: a hundred and fifty dollars.
Unfortunately, this was not an outlier experience for kids trying to earn money.
I've collected these stories for years, because part of my work has been fighting to make kids' businesses legal—actually legal, in the eyes of the law. And once you start looking, they're everywhere. An eleven-year-old girl in Portland couldn't sell mistletoe at a holiday market without a permit, though a city official helpfully pointed out she'd be allowed to beg for the money instead.
Two teenagers in New Jersey went door to door offering to shovel snow before a storm and got stopped by police because they didn't have a solicitation permit. Those, by the way, run as much as $450 in some towns.
None of these kids were a problem anyone actually needed solved. A child with a pitcher and a hand-lettered sign is not what those licensing laws were written for, but the laws were on the books, and so, technically, most of the lemonade stands in America are illegal. And every so often some bureaucrat decides to enforce it against a second-grader.
I think about this stuff a lot, because I got into this fight almost by accident.
When I started the Libertas Network, I ran it out of my house for a while, and the city informed me I couldn't operate a business from home without the right permits — never mind that it was a nonprofit that wasn't turning a personal dime. I learned the hard way that you don't win by arguing with city hall. So we tried something different. We went to the state legislature with a simple idea: stop letting cities require permits and licenses for businesses run by kids.
Around that same time, some families near us in Utah were holding a children's market in the parking lot of a privately owned inn—the one place the local rules couldn't reach, since it was private property. My own kids set up there. They sold marshmallow shooters they'd built themselves out of PVC pipe, three bucks each, and it came with a little bag of marshmallows to fire. Watching them price it, build inventory, and actually make change for customers did more for them than any worksheet ever could. The problem is that the only reason they could do it at all was that patch of private pavement. Step onto a public sidewalk and the same stand would've been against the law.
That was the basis for the whole argument, really. Kids should get a few years to taste the free market before the crushing weight of bureaucracy settles onto them for good.
Utah passed the first law protecting kid entrepreneurs in 2017. Colorado followed. Then Texas, Missouri, Nebraska, and by now more than a dozen states have some version of it on the books. It passed everywhere with support from both parties, because it turns out there's almost nothing left in American politics that a Republican and a Democrat can still agree on faster than "maybe don't send a cop to bust a kid's lemonade stand".
I tell you all this because it gets at something I care about more than the permits themselves.
A kid entrepreneur—a real one, with real money on the line—learns things no classroom can teach. They set a price too high and see nobody stops. They run out of cups mid-rush with customers standing right there, and they feel the pain of lost profit. They count it all up at the end, subtract what the supplies cost, and hold in their hand a small, real profit that exists only because they made something someone else wanted.
That's the entire foundation of economics, absorbed in an afternoon, sweating it out at a folding table.
That's exactly what we built Business Basics. It's a full financial literacy and entrepreneurship course for eight and nine year olds. Thirty-six lessons where kids don't read about running a business, they run one (pricing, budgeting, customers, the whole thing.) There's even a lesson on planning a giving project with what they earn, because figuring out what to do with money matters just as much as making it.
It's new, it's $39, and it's part of our Back to School sale which gives you up to 70% off our best-loved resources:
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Business Basics Grade 3 — $39. The new financial literacy and entrepreneurship course for 8–9-year-olds.
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Back to School Bundle — $119.88 (total value $419.44). All 14 children's books, plus every workbook, parent guide, and audiobook.
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Family Starter Pack — $229.95 (total value $870.72). Everything above, plus all three volumes of America's History with the full curriculum.
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Mega Bundle — $529 (total value $1,371.20). The whole library, including the teen guidebooks and Choose Your Consequence novels.
Here's what I hope you’ll do this week: Find out whether kids' stands are even legal where you live (if they aren’t, you know you’ve got some important work to do!) Then, help your kid set one up. Let them pick the wrong price and feel the silence. Let them run out of cups. Let them adjust pricing based on how people respond to it. Let them count the money on the counter and do the math.
Watch them come to life with their first real taste of ownership!
And, if you pass a kid's stand this week, stop the car. Buy a cup. Because somewhere a seven-year-old is running a business the law only recently decided to leave alone.
The least we can do is be their best customer.
— Connor
