422
Breyer, J., dissenting
and Nutrition of the House Committee on Agriculture, 101st Cong., 1st Sess., 99 (1989) (hereinafter Hearings) (statement of Rep. Grant) (noting need to overcome consumer fears about safety of eating mushrooms and that per capita mushroom consumption in Canada was twice that of United States). Overcoming those perceptions will sometimes bring special public benefits. See 7 U. S. C. §§ 6101(a)(1)-(3) (mushrooms are "valuable part of the human diet," and their production "benefits the environment"). And compelled payment may be needed to produce those benefits where, otherwise, some producers would take a free ride on the expenditures of others. See Hearings 95-96 (statement of James Ciarrocchi) ("The . . . industry has embarked on several voluntary promotion campaigns over the years. . . . [A] lesson from every one . . . has been unreliability, inefficiency, and inequities of voluntary participation").
Compared with traditional "command and control," price, or output regulation, this kind of regulation—which relies upon self-regulation through industry trade associations and upon the dissemination of information—is more consistent, not less consistent, with producer choice. It is difficult to see why a Constitution that seeks to protect individual freedom would consider the absence of "heavy regulation," ante, at 413, to amount to a special, determinative reason for refusing to permit this less intrusive program. If the Court classifies the former, more comprehensive regulatory scheme as "economic regulation" for First Amendment purposes, it should similarly classify the latter, which does not differ significantly but for the comparatively greater degree of freedom that it allows.
The Court invokes in support of its conclusion other First Amendment precedent, namely, Abood v. Detroit Bd. of Ed., 431 U. S. 209 (1977), Keller v. State Bar of Cal., 496 U. S. 1 (1990), West Virginia Bd. of Ed. v. Barnette, 319 U. S. 624 (1943), and Wooley v. Maynard, 430 U. S. 705 (1977). But those cases are very different. The first two, Abood and
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