Sounds fine, but the movement is opposed to many of the policies put in place to protect workers: the 40 hour work week, overtime pay, child labor laws and the like. Freedom of the business owner takes precedence over governmental laws meant to protect workers. Capital trumps labor.
Here's an argument that a handful of libertarian legal scholars are working to undo the legal rationale that underlies the New Deal. This includes revisiting a controversial case from 1905 Lochner v New York. I'll post something that separately, but this article tells us a few things about how change on the Supreme Court can be accomplished.
It focuses primarily on one of the leading figures of this movement, Randy Barnett, and his efforts to redefine conservatism on the court from being restrained to activist.
- Click here for it.
Eventually, Barnett clawed his way to Boston University, and then to Georgetown, where he joined the faculty in 2006. (“I love the situation here,” he said of his current digs. “I don’t need to be on the outs.”) But even as his career took off, his legal views remained decidedly anti-establishment. Barnett believes the Constitution exists to secure inalienable property and contract rights for individuals. This may sound like a bland and inconsequential opinion, but if widely adopted by our courts and political systems it would prohibit or call into question basic governmental protections—minimum wages, food-safety regulations, child-labor laws—that most of us take for granted. For nearly a century now, a legal counterculture has insisted that the whole New Deal project was a big, unconstitutional error, and Barnett is a big part of that movement today.
