Cite as: 521 U. S. 457 (1997)
Souter, J., dissenting
program might well become "free riders" if promotion were to become wholly voluntary, to the point of cutting the sum total of advertising done. That might happen. It is also reasonably conceivable, though, that pure self-interest would keep the level of voluntary advertising high enough that the mandatory program could only be seen as affecting the details of the ads or shifting their costs, in either event without effect on market stability or income to producers as a group.14 We, of course, do not know, but these possibilities alone should be fatal to the Government here, which has the burden to establish the factual justification for ordering a subsidy for commercial speech. Mere speculation about one or another possibility does not carry the burden, see Turner Broadcasting System, 512 U. S., at 664; Edenfield v. Fane, 507 U. S., at 770-771, and the Government has to show that its mandatory scheme appreciably increases the total amount of advertising for a commodity or somehow does a better job of sparking the right level of consumer demand than a wholly voluntary system would. There is no evidence of this in the record here.
C
Finally, a regulation of commercial speech must be narrowly tailored to achieving the government's interests; there must be a " 'fit' between the legislature's ends and the means chosen to accomplish those ends,—a fit . . . that represents not necessarily the single best disposition but one whose
14 While even on the cost-shifting scenario the Government would have reduced the "problem" of free riders referred to by the Secretary, that would not be a sufficient freestanding justification for the program. "[P]rivate speech often furthers the interests of nonspeakers, and that does not alone empower the state to compel the speech to be paid for," Lehnert v. Ferris Faculty Assn., 500 U. S., at 556 (Scalia, J., concurring in judgment in part and dissenting in part). We have never sustained a restriction on speech solely because some individuals would ride free on the private speech of others, but only when the free-rider problem arises in serving other substantial governmental interests.
501
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