Pennsylvania enhances its bad reputation for being anti-business by threatening a stay-at-home mom with $10 million in fines for selling items on eBay without having an auctioneer’s license. The commonwealth is deciding whether to require an electronic auctioneer’s license (with a licensing fee) or to permit online auctions without such a license.

You can read more about it at philly.com in Bob Fernandez’s article titled “Pennsylvania takes on online auctions.”

What to learn from her experience? Here are three lessons:

1. Vote with your feet by moving to a pro-business state.

2. The government is always looking for ways to control you through regulation and/or taxation.

3. Put the proper legal safeguards in place so that you don’t become the next victim of bureaucracy run amuck.

About the Author

With an advanced international law degree from Georgetown University and more than 14 years of real world legal experience, Attorney Mike Young shows entrepreneurs how to protect and grow their businesses online. He's the author of "Internet Marketing Legal Secrets Revealed," "How to Create Your Own Internet Business Without a Lawyer for Under $175," and the creator of Website Legal Forms Generator^TM. Not just a lawyer who focuses exclusively on Internet and marketing law, Mike’s been working with computers for more than 27 years (his first computer was an Atari 400 with 8 KiB RAM) and started representing Internet businesses back in 1996.