Food Truck venders have been battling for their rights to sell people food they want to buy lately, which is a total abuse of government power. I’ve been hearing about the struggle here in California for a few years. Big Government even went as far as to ban new fast food restaurants from opening in South LA (sorry economy. sorry Los Angeles unemployment rate, including the 20% of LA’s black community that has not worked in the past year. You don’t have a say in the matter).
Now mobile venders in El Paso Texas have just won a big victory on this battlefield by getting a zoning restriction repealed after suing over their unconstitutional nature.
The reason the law wants to ban food trucks is to protect big businesses from small businesses. Insanity. Susie Diaz, EP of the Restaurant Association admitted on camera “We wanted this ordinance in place to help established restaurants keep their business”.
The Institute for Justice explained the fight in January:
Practiced since ancient times, street vending is more popular than ever. The Economist magazine predicted that in 2011 “some of the best food Americans eat may come from a food truck.” Vendors are the darlings of many food critics, and they even have their own reality show on the Food Network.
But El Paso, Texas, has recently made it illegal for mobile food vendors to operate within 1,000-feet of any restaurant, convenience store, or grocer. The city even prohibits vendors from parking to await customers, which forces vendors to constantly drive around town until a customer successfully flags them down–and then be on the move again as soon as the customer walks away.
Thus, while people across the country embrace mobile vendors for the vitality and creativity they bring to a local restaurant scene, El Paso has decided to threaten vendors with thousands of dollars in fines and effectively run them out of town. El Paso’s No-Vending Zone scheme is in place for one reason: to protect brick-and-mortar restaurants from honest competition. But economic protectionism is not a valid use of government power.