Well-meaning, but Without Understanding

The following quote from an article in "The Freeman", my favorite print magazine (with archived articles online from 1955 to present here) caught my fancy. "Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning, but without understanding."

- Justice Louis D. Brandeis, Supreme Court Associate Justice 1916-1939
quoted in The Freeman, May 1956

What I found interesting is that I did a search for Brandeis to learn a bit about him. The first link I went to was here. It tells how he worked "aiding the cause of the minimum wage against companies opposed to this principle.". Clearly, he would fall under the umbrella of "well-meaning, but without understanding" of his own judgement for this position.

For a clear understanding of the economic consequences of minimum wage laws, I recomment Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson.