On Saturday, June 23rd, Alison Ettel called police on a young girl selling water without a permit in Oakland, CA. The girl's relative caught a video of Ettel, tweeted it out, and an Internet rage mob had identified her and her business within hours.

Twitter quickly dubbed the then-unidentified woman in the video #PermitPatty.

The video is frustrating. It starts midway through an altercation with Permit Patty, a grown woman more than capable of remonstrating with a child, on the phone with what one assumes is the Oakland Police Department. Upon seeing herself filmed, she ducks behind a brick wall until the seller's cousin confronts her personally.

(Ettel has since claimed that she was only "pretending" to call the police and did so after an altercation with the girl's mother.)

Most of the discussion around #PermitPatty (and her metaphorical accomplice, #BBQBecky, another Oakland woman who called police on a black man using a charcoal grill in a public park) focuses on the racial element at play. Patty and Becky are well-educated white women calling the police on black people committing what are, at-best, nonviolent infractions of municipal code.

Permit Patty may be a racist, I don't know.

She is indicative of a deeper and less-obvious problem in American society. This deeper problem comes from years of cultural and economic stagnation, decades of drilling a permission-based mindset into the lives of young Americans, and a slow decay of American civil society.

Permit Patty is a symptom of entrepreneurial decay. That we live in a world where it is at all normalized for a grown woman to call the police on a young business owner should give us pause to stop and think about how we got here.

Entrepreneurship Builds Civil Society

I've written before about how, contrary to popular belief, entrepreneurship among younger generations is declining, despite it never before being technologically easier to get started on a business. Too much debt, too much stifling, industrialized schooling, and too few role models for entrepreneurial activity all create this environment.  

It's easy to stop and say, "too many busybodies like #PermitPatty, too." But that gets the cycle backwards. Permit Patty is just a symptom of a society in which entrepreneurship (especially street markets and especially youth entrepreneurship) is so rare that somebody can stop and think, "does this person have a permit?"

That some people rush to Permit Patty's defense is another sign of this entrepreneurial and civil decay.