Rosa Parks’ case was appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. While that process unfolded, the bus boycott angered many white people in the city, and there was some violence—the homes of both Nixon and King were bombed. But the activists pressed forward, creating substantial press coverage and ultimately a victory from the Supreme Court. Rosa Parks became “the mother of the civil rights movement.”
Parks suffered in her later years—both financially and physically. Despite these trials, she was honored throughout her life for her role in sparking a movement and endearing many to the cause of equal rights. Looking back on her actions, she wrote:
The time had just come when I had been pushed as far as I could stand to be pushed, I suppose… I had decided that I would have to know, once and for all, what rights I had as a human being, and a citizen.26
Rosa’s civil disobedience created a long chain of events that helped bring the answer to that very question.
…and many more
In 1971, a massive “non-cooperation” movement was launched against the ruling government in West Pakistan in order to pressure the Pakistani state to accept the results of the previous year’s election. Government offices, public transportation, and schools all shut down as East Pakistanis stopped paying their taxes. The civil disobedience ended when the Pakistan Army launched a military offensive 18 days later, killing tens of thousands.27
Egyptians chafed under British rule in the early 1900s. Saad Zaghloul worked with fellow activists to rally the people towards independence, using acts of civil disobedience to frustrate Britain’s efforts to maintain its authority. Ministers quit and lawyers went on strike, bringing the judicial system to a halt. Trade guilds, religious leaders, and students demonstrated in the streets against the Brits. Fearing an uprising, British authorities arrested Zaghloul and exiled him from the country. But the acts of civil disobedience continued, leading in several instances to revolutionary violence. The opposition forced London to issue a declaration of Egyptian independence in 1922. Now free, Zaghlul became Egypt’s first popularly elected Prime Minister in 1924.28
Following the state-sponsored execution of Jesus Christ, his apostles had continued preaching their Christian doctrine—something that the Jews saw as heretical and worthy of punishment. The Sadducees, a Jewish sect that dominated the government, had presumably hoped that killing Jesus would stop the uprising and force his followers to disperse. This didn’t happen, so the authorities, who by this point were “filled with indignation,” ordered the arrest and imprisonment of Peter and his fellow apostles. They were released without permission overnight—the Bible says it was an angel’s doing—and resumed preaching. Arrested once more, the apostles were brought before the high priest who said, “Did not we straitly command you that ye should not teach in this name? and, behold, ye have filled Jerusalem with your doctrine, and intend to bring this man’s blood upon us.” Peter’s response was simple, and points to the virtue of civil disobedience in following a higher law that conflicts with an unjust, man-made law: “We ought to obey God rather than men.”29 The apostles were physically beaten and then released.
Along with other men his age, boxing legend Muhammad Ali was called up in the draft to enlist in the army. Ali, who had been a longtime opponent of the Vietnam War, showed up to the Houston Military Entrance Processing Station in Texas. As each man’s name was called out, he stepped forward to begin the induction process. Ali refused to comply, for which he was arrested, and was then tried, convicted, and sentenced to five years in prison for refusing to serve in the military. He was also ordered to pay a $10,000 fine for draft evasion. Ali explained his defiance: “Why should me and other so-called ‘negroes’ go 10,000 miles away from home, here in America, to drop bombs and bullets on other innocent brown people who’s never bothered us? I will say directly: No, I will not go.”30 His principled stance cost him dearly. Though the U.S. Supreme Court overturned his conviction a few years later, Ali was stripped of his world heavyweight title, and his boxing license was suspended.31
And, as you can guess, civil disobedience can even apply to a simple lemonade stand. After seeing news reports of little children having their stands shut down by police officers and bureaucrats, Robert Fernandes created “Lemonade Freedom Day” to raise awareness of the problem and, as an adult, practice some civil disobedience to show the injustice of the law. “These kids are learning how to run a small business,” Fernandes said. “I think by telling them they can’t do that, you’re shutting down their dreams.” Fernandes and a group of other protesters set up shop on the front lawn of the U.S. Capitol, joined in protest by others around the country doing the same thing in their various locations. Police officers arrived, ordering them to leave. “So you want to be arrested for your cause of lemonade liberation?” one officer taunted. As dozens of cups of lemonade were distributed for ten cents apiece, three of the participants were arrested for “vending without a permit.”32
Day after day, thousands of positive laws turn otherwise law-abiding individuals into criminals for doing nothing wrong. Peaceful acts of civil disobedience, when done in furtherance of a higher law, can help others realize the injustice an individual faces and rally support to push for change. Open defiance for the right reasons, and handled in the right way, can inspire others to act; it’s hard to see a person suffering unjustly without having a desire to help.
If there are so many positive laws prohibiting things that aren’t inherently wrong, why don’t we see more civil disobedience? If thousands of unjust laws restrict the rights of billions of people, why aren’t there enough stories of resistance to fill entire libraries? The answer is rather simple: risk tolerance.
In the financial world, risk tolerance is a basic method used to determine how you want to save or invest the money you’ve earned. If you want to play it safe and avoid losing your money, then you can put it in a savings account at the bank. If you’re willing to risk losing your money with the potential of earning a lot more if things go well, then maybe you would buy a company’s stock or invest in a mutual fund.
This same situation applies to doing what the state requires of you. It may be unjust and illegitimate, but each person must make a calculation about how much risk they are willing to assume. If the issue is unimportant—for example, jaywalking—then it may not be worth having to pay a large fine or having to tell future employers that you have an arrest record. But if the issue is significant—for example, the National Security Agency spying on American citizens without first obtaining a warrant—then it may be worth risking your freedoms in order to alert the public and push for legal reform.
Jefferson and his fellow Declaration drafters were right: “all experience hath shewn [sic] that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing [or, perhaps, resisting] the forms to which they are accustomed.” History offers us inspiring stories of those who chose to stand up for what’s right when it was declared wrong. But many people prefer to avoid risk and play it safe—and that’s understandable. There are many reasons to resist, and anyone who has not given the state consent should, in theory at least, dissent. But we generally don’t because we prefer to remain with our family rather than in a jail cell. Liberty isn’t easy, after all.
After Thoreau was freed from jail, he set out to continue his social experiment. Children in the nearby area asked for his help searching for huckleberries in a nearby field. Thoreau enjoyed the experience—he was in nature, living. As he walked along one of the town’s highest hills, presumably soaking in the surrounding sights, he looked around and observed that “the state was nowhere to be seen.”33 Others may try to control our lives unjustly, and we may struggle under the burdens the state places upon us. But the world of Equality 7-2521 is fortunately not ours—we still have and understand our individuality. The state is not everywhere, nor can it control everything—and we should act accordingly. That’s al
l civil disobedience is.

NOTES
Micheline Ishay, ed., The Human Rights Reader: Major Political Writings, Essays, Speeches, and Documents from the Bible to the Present (New York: Routledge, 1997) 26.
See Ayn Rand, Anthem (Claremont; Coyote Canyon Press, 2008).
Harold Bloom, ed., Henry David Thoreau (New York: Bloom’s, 2008), 6.
Henry David Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience” (Salt Lake City: Libertas Institute, 2014), 3.
J. Sowle, ed., A Collection of the Works of William Penn (London: J. Sowle, 1726), 241
Mary Maples Dunn and Richard S. Dunn, eds., The Papers of William Penn, vol. 1: 1644-1679 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 85.
John D. Inazu, Liberty’s Refuge: The Forgotten Freedom of Assembly (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 24.
Charles F. Partington, ed., The British Cyclopedia of Biography, vol. 2 (London: WM. S. ORR & Co. 1838), 558.
Thomas Clarkson, ed., Memoirs of the Private and Public Life of William Penn, vol. 1 (Dover: Samuel Stevens, 1827), 39.
David Conley Nelson, Moroni and the Swastika: Mormons in Nazi Germany (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015), 290.
Ibid, 292.
Ibid.
Ibid, 297.
Ibid, 298.
Ibid, 303.
Peter Wyden, The Hitler Virus (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2002).
Paul R. Bartrop, Resisting the Holocaust: Upstanders, Partisans, and Survivors (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2016), 105.
Joyce A. Hanson, Rosa Parks: A Biography (Santa Barbara: Greenwood, 2011), 10.
Ibid, 11.
Ibid.
Rosa Parks, Rosa Parks: My Story (New York: Puffin Books, 1999), 142.
Ibid, 116.
Ibid, 117.
“Rosa Parks,” History, http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/rosa-parks.
Ibid.
Stewart Burns, Daybreak of Freedom: The Montgomery Bus Boycott (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997) 83-84.
See S.M. Shamsul Alam, Governmentality and Counter-Hegemony in Bangladesh (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
M. Cherif Bassiouni, Chronicles of the Egyptian Revolution and Its Aftermath: 2011–2016 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 571.
Acts 5:17-28.
Tom Mulle, “Muhammad Ali Was No Draft Dodger,” Newsweek, June 6, 2016, http://www.newsweek.com/muhammad-ali-was-no-draft-dodger-466955.
“Muhammad Ali Was Stripped of His World Heavyweight Title for Refusing to Join the Army in 1967,” New York Daily News, June 3, 2016, http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/ali-stripped-title-refusing-join-army-1967-article-1.2660321.
Alexander Abad-Santos, “The Battle Against Lemonade Stand Crackdowns,” Atlantic, August 22, 2011, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/08/battle-agasint-lemonade-stand-crackdowns/354415/.
Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience,” 24.
CONCLUSION
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Lemonade stands may be a staple of summertime, but they are also an excellent analogy for the modern clash between freedom and the state. Sure, it may be easy to simply comply—to pay the money and pass the inspections and get the permission slip—but whatever happened to simply having some fun and making some money without all the bureaucracy and red tape? Whatever happened to having freedom?
If one thing should be clear by this point in the book, it’s this: true freedom is not something that is experienced in today’s world. States rule without the consent of the governed; positive laws abound. There are many laws that can easily be classified as immoral or unjust, and there may be times when you are compelled to do something that violates your conscience. The state’s success depends upon your submission.
“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice,” observed Elie Wiesel, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, during his acceptance speech. “But there must never be a time when we fail to protest.”1 These words have power because they are deeply personal. At age 15, Wiesel watched as German soldiers invaded his Hungarian town, deporting his family alongside the other Jews to Auschwitz, where up to 90% of the people who were imprisoned there were exterminated. His mother and younger sister were immediately murdered, while he and his father were forced to perform manual labor until they could no longer do so, at which point they would also be killed in the gas chambers. His father was later beaten and killed; Wiesel survived, carrying the tattoo of his inmate number on his left arm for the rest of his life as a reminder of the oppression he experienced.2
Acts of tyranny such as these are fortunately rare. It is not common to experience such awful displays of state-sponsored aggression. Rather, most violations of one’s natural rights are simple, quiet, and far less controversial. Think of the mother who does African hair braiding, only to be shut down by the state for failure to obtain a cosmetology license—one that requires 2,000 hours of training at a school that doesn’t even teach African hair braiding. What about an Uber driver who is fined thousands of dollars because the city’s laws prohibit this form of transportation in an effort to protect taxis? Then there are the senior citizens whose lawns begin drying up who then receive warnings and fines from city bureaucrats for having an unsightly landscape. Or, consider the plight of an unemployed property owner who loses his home after being arrested for renting out his basement so he could have enough money to pay his mortgage.
These violations are akin to the ancient Chinese strategy of lingchi. Throughout history, the state has been one of the leading causes of death; in the twentieth century alone, 262 million people worldwide were killed by their own government.3 Known as democide, the methods used to kill nonconformist citizens are typically quick: bombs, guns, gas, etc. But in imperial China, lingchi was often used—a slow form of torture sometimes called “death by a thousand cuts.” Those sentenced to this fate would be tied to a post, and repeatedly cut until death finally came sometime later. This is the form in which most threats to our freedom appear—small, slow, and simple. For example, the government is likely not going to seize your bank account and take all your money. Instead, you’ll simply be told to pay your ever-increasing taxes, bit by bit, year after year.
This is heavy stuff, no doubt. You may be unsure what to do about any of this. The problems seem so large, and the ideal seems so far off, that you wonder what can be done—if anything.
What if I told you that you have already done something that will help?
Imagine for a moment that you own a piece of land—one that has been in your family’s possession for a very long time. But this land is in dispute because a neighbor claims that some of it is actually his. The problem is, you’re not sure if he’s right or not—you don’t know quite where the boundaries of your land are. Through the generations, some legal documents about your property were lost, and others had handwriting that was hard to interpret. So the neighbor, seeing your uncertainty, begins to encroach further and further onto the land. You suspect he has gone too far, but because you’re not sure where the property line actually is, you can’t stop him.
If you can’t point and say, “You may not go past this line,” then there is no line. You can’t defend what you don’t know to be true.
If you don’t understand what types of law are valid, then you would be led to assume that all of them are. If you can’t identify a malum prohibitum, your sense of right and wrong will be blurry; you could not point out that something is considered wrong merely because some politicians declare it so. And if you are unaware of the problems of implied consent, then you can’t comprehend why the state’s authority over you is illegitimate.
If you don’t know what your rights are, you are powerless to protect them as your neighbors, through the state, encroach upon them further and further. But you do know, so y
ou can try to protect them. You now have a line to point to. There is a line.
What you do with this information is up to you. Perhaps you’ll be a more informed voter. Maybe you’ll start a nonprofit organization to educate others or become a political science professor to help the rising generation understand this line. You might seek an elected office to try and repeal malum prohibitum laws. Maybe you’ll simply go about your business, finding the huckleberry fields in your own life where the state is nowhere to be seen.
Or maybe you’ll set up a lemonade stand—without anyone’s permission.
NOTES
Elie Wiesel, “Hope, Despair and Memory,” Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1986, http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1986/wiesel-lecture.html.
Elie Wiesel, Night (New York City: Hill and Wang, 2006).
R. J. Rummel, Death by Government (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1994).
AUTHOR’S NOTE
N
While Henry David Thoreau advocated for civil disobedience in certain cases, he posed a question that each of us must answer:
Unjust laws exist; shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?1
Elaine Augustine, like most parents, wants her children to be law-abiding citizens. But the laws requiring her children to obtain permits and licenses and pay fees to the government in order to set up shop from time to time are wrong. She faced the same question Thoreau posed. “Here was a ridiculous law leaving me the option of ignoring it and teaching my kids that it was okay to ignore the law,” she said, “or, voluntarily complying by either making my children get licensed or not letting them engage in business activities.”2
Lessons from a Lemonade Stand Page 11
