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20 also concede that States may often adopt laws addressing even “imperfectly understood” health risks associated with goods sold within their borders. Reply Brief 13. And, again, no one disputes that some who voted for Proposition 12 may have done so with just that sort of goal in mind. See, e.g., USDA Proposed Rule To Amend Organic Livestock and Poultry Production Requirements, 87 Fed. Reg. 48565 (2022) (affording animals more space “may result in healthier livestock products for human consumption”).

So even accepting everything petitioners say, we remain left with a task no court is equipped to undertake. On the one hand, some out-of-state producers who choose to comply with Proposition 12 may incur new costs. On the other hand, the law serves moral and health interests of some (disputable) magnitude for in-state residents. Some might reasonably find one set of concerns more compelling. Others might fairly disagree. How should we settle that dispute? The competing goods are incommensurable. Your guess is as good as ours.

More accurately, your guess is better than ours. In a functioning democracy, policy choices like these usually belong to the people and their elected representatives. They are entitled to weigh the relevant “political and economic” costs and benefits for themselves, ''Moorman Mfg. Co. v. Bair, 437 U. S. 267, 279 (1978), and “try novel social and economic experiments” if they wish, New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann'', 285 U. S. 262, 311 (1932) (Brandeis, J., dissenting). Judges cannot displace the cost-benefit analyses embodied in democratically adopted legislation guided by nothing more than their own faith in “Mr. Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics,” Lochner v. New York, 198 U. S. 45, 75 (1905) (Holmes, J., dissenting)—or, for that matter, Mr. Wilson Pond’s Pork Production Systems, see W. Pond, J. Maner, & D. Harris, Pork Production Systems: Efficient Use of Swine and Feed Resources (1991).

If, as petitioners insist, California’s law really does