Could the US Government Run a Lemonade Stand?

Why would anyone want this?

The US government has made a habit of providing lemonade to the people of our fair city. Maybe selling it at Walmart is not the best conceivable option for such a large and important undertaking. You’d think the government could get its act together sufficiently to run its own lemonade stand. Maybe the Department of Information could hand out their weekly flyers there too.

Some people don’t like going in to Walmart, some resent their every visit being recorded on the store surveillance cameras, and some people are banned from Walmart. So it might be better, democratically speaking, for the government to run its own lemonade stand.

Technical and Organizational Hurdles

Given the massive complexity and funding challenges of running a lemonade stand, we can assume that it would take several years to set up and that it would cost of several billion dollars. There may be requirements for new banking regulations, new government departments, NASA will probably want to get involved, and there will need to be user training and onboarding programs to make sure everyone is well prepared for serving and receiving lemonade.

Policy

Without the convenience of relying on Walmart to provide its reassuringly friendly and reliable security enforcement, we’ll need new procedures to deal with the kinds of hate speech, CSAM, terrorism, sedition, treason, weapons smuggling, drug trafficking, and moral hazard that are very likely to occur at any lemonade stand.

It will take a large team of lawyers to come up with reasonable ways to run a lemonade stand without violating the 8th amendment.

It’s Still Worth Trying

Sure is a lot of work, so we’d better get started.