Harry Dresden
Adamantium Member
The notion of returning to a pre-Lochner legal/economic paradigm is the most egregious manifestation of ignorant, reckless, and irresponsible rightwing reactionaryism.In 2013, Paul endorsed a long-ago overruled Supreme Court decision called Lochner v. New York. The Courts Lochner opinion relied on a fabricated right to contract that it and subsequent cases used to strike down various laws protecting workers from exploitative employers
This is the 21st Century, we exist in a global economy, and commerce occurs in interrelated markets both National and international. Libertarians and most on the right harbor a pathetic and naïve fantasy of reinstating anachronistic economic doctrines such as freedom of contract which have been neither valid nor applicable for over 100 years and for good reason: such doctrines are no longer capable of sustaining a modern, industrialized, first world economy as exists in the United States and most Western nations.
Indeed, by the second quarter of the 20th Century, the courts had wisely and appropriately acknowledged the reality of a modern economy and the true nature of the American workplace common to most Americans:
The [Washington State] legislature was entitled to adopt measures to reduce the evils of the "sweating system," [p399] the exploiting of workers at wages so low as to be insufficient to meet the bare cost of living, thus making their very helplessness the occasion of a most injurious competition.
There is no absolute freedom to do as one wills or to contract as one chooses. The guaranty of liberty does not withdraw from legislative supervision that wide department of activity which consists of the making of contracts, or deny to government the power to provide restrictive safeguards. Liberty implies the absence of arbitrary restraint, not immunity from reasonable regulations and prohibitions imposed in the interests of the community. The legislature had the right to consider that its minimum wage requirements would be an important aid in carrying out its policy of protection. The adoption of similar requirements by many States evidences a deep-seated conviction both as to the presence of the evil and as to the means adapted to check it. Legislative response to that conviction cannot be regarded as arbitrary or capricious, and that is all we have to decide. Even if the wisdom of the policy be regarded as debatable and its effects uncertain, still the legislature is entitled to its judgment.
West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish (1937)
This is going to be fun.
What, exactly, makes you the ultimate authority on Lochner? Are you aware that a lot of scholars, both conservatives and liberal, think Lochner was one of the worst decisions the court ever handed down?
did you not know QW?.....No_Reply_Jones is an Attorney....or so i am told by others here....