That's true enough but it sidesteps the reality that there is no economic activity that these people don't favor regulating to the nth degree. They talk of privacy and civil rights, but when it comes to commerce, they recognize no right of privacy and no individual rights. All property is up for grabs to control and meld in the name of national well-being.
Judge Posner, rather than recognize this and the threat it poses to life and liberty, instead mongers fear and urges us to cede more power to government over highly speculative possibilities, all the while dismissing civil libertarians as "ignorant."
Thus, we are left with the prospect of Congress forcing us to use less fossil-based fuels (which are cost-effective and efficient) and replace those fuels with government-approved fuels, which are prohibitively expensive and inefficient.
It is no coincidence that many who oppose immigration also oppose free trade, support the war on drugs, and repeatedly suggest as remedies for every social ill more prisons, more regulations, more prosecutions, more fines, and more government.
The best solution is also the simplest: get the state out of the way.
Friedman maintained that the policies of the Great Depression were a failure because they were not based on his own interventionist proposals: to inflate and undermine property contracts. From this perspective, the state failed not because it didn't "let the market work" but because it didn't let the Chicago bureaucrats work.
This means that employment among the young, the inexperienced, and unskilled will decline with the institution of a higher minimum wage.
The evidence is only that jobholders and jobseekers are alike subject to a law which nature, perhaps unfortunately, has made universal. Like all the rest of us, they tend always to satisfy their needs and desires with the least possible exertion.
The second noticeable consequence of the state's activity in everybody's business but its own is that its own business is monstrously neglected.
