Progressivism is hostile to America’s premise that individuals possess rights that preexist government, not fully enumerated in the Constitution

This is the decision Sarah Palin should have had immediately to mind as what lay beneath her fine instincts on human nature when Katie Couric sought to make her look like a salmon slapping hick for being a female conservative who raised up her head

In 1905 the Supreme Court ruled INIDIVUALS MAKING CONTRACTS SUPERCEDED STATE LAW WHICH INFRINGED THAT RIGHT

WaPo and George Will:

An 1895 New York law limited bakery employees to working 10 hours a day and 60 hours a week. Ostensibly, this was health and safety legislation; actually, it was rent-seeking by large, unionized bakeries and the unions. Corporate bakeries supported the legislation, which burdened their small, family-owned competitors. The bakers union hoped to suppress the small, non-unionized bakeries that depended on flexible work schedules.

One such was owned by Joseph Lochner, who challenged the law, prevailing in the Supreme Court, 5 to 4. The majority said “clean and wholesome bread” does not depend on limiting workers’ hours: Workers are “in no sense wards of the state,” and there is no evidence that baking is an especially unhealthful profession, so the law was an unconstitutional “interference” with an unenumerated right of individuals, the liberty of contract.

The main dissent radiated progressivism’s statism and paternalism: Government may limit working hours lest workers damage their “physical and mental capacity to serve the State, and to provide for those dependent upon them.” In another dissent, ultimately famous and hugely influential, Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose judicial restraint often expressed his dogmatic majoritarianism, defended “the right of a majority to embody their opinions in law.” He said liberty should not be construed “to prevent the natural outcome of a dominant opinion.”

I never thought less of Homes in my LIFE than when I read those words. They are a defense of tyrannical rule of the majority and antithetical in EVERY WAY to the Bill of rights.

Princeton’s president, Woodrow Wilson, agreed, dismissing “the inalienable rights of the individual” as “nonsense” inimical to government’s ability to efficiently work its progressive will.

The individual possesses inalienable rights — here, liberty of contract — that cannot be legislated away for casual or disreputable reasons. Hence progressives’ frequent denunciations of “individualism” — allowing individual rights, particularly those of property and contract, to impede the administrative state’s regulation of society, immune from judicial review.

Bernstein recounts how liberty of contract was invoked — sometimes successfully, usually not — against legislatures that declared women unsuited to practice law or limited women to working fewer hours than men. Labor unions representing male bartenders produced Michigan’s law banning female bartenders.

Lochner’s logic — that individual rights often trump government’s powers to boss people around.

Long execrated by most law professors, Lochner is the liberals’ least favorite decision because its premises pose a threat to their aspiration, which is to provide an emancipation proclamation for regulatory government. The rehabilitation of Lochner is another step in the disarmament of such thinking.