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>>What sort of horror would ensue if the musicians were unpermitted?<<

There are too darned many of them. (BTW, I am a musician myself.)

Imagine what would happen if it really was a free-for-all. You’d have musicians (most of them virtually without skill or talent) competing 15 feet apart from each other, every 15 feet.

Wherever people gather in large numbers, it is a magnet for every wanna be juggler, guitar player, and every other person attempting to make a buck off a skill that is easy to acquire, to practice for the occasional quarter. Heck, even I thought of doing it to harden my chops. And even the way it’s set up now, many of the street musicians are guys that have the playing skills of a child that has been to two months of guitar training.

Nobody would be killed, true, but it is just more civilized when the government makes it a little harder for just anyone to plop down and start making a racket with an out of tune guitar missing two strings - or selling non-homogenized milk that was sitting in their barn for a week.

Yes, it’s a fine line that many governments have stepped FAR over into becoming a pure revenue source, but the alternative is not a pretty thing. It would ruin many of the street fairs, markets, etc. around the country. And, for the people visiting the location, it DOES work.

Now, a private event, on private property, is a whole ‘nother animal.

I can sort of see your point, and it is a local control issue... But I think they would manage to sort them selves out.
Being in Ag I tend to have a knee jerk reaction to rules. It is unlikely that anyone would sell week old milk, because you want your customers to come back, alive, and with out a pitch fork.

I sell pigs, send them off to a USDA butcher shop that smokes and cures the meat.
Thanks to USDA rules, the smallest portion I can sell you is 1/2 of a pig, unless I send the live to a slaughter house. This rule only servers the large slaughter houses. There is no way I would want to sell tainted meat to a customer. As you can guess this really cuts down on the customer base. They need to have a large freezer, and want to have all cuts, and the ability to consume this much of a pig over a 6 month period.

Why isn't the fact that I sent them to a usda approved butcher shop good enough? I would contend that it is just a matter of supporting businesses that can get regulation passed that works for them.