Let people decide how long they will work and under what terms, not a committee of politicians labeling what counts as “protective” hours. The move to permit a 13‑hour day on up to 37 days a year is a classic example of government stepping into the voluntary exchange space and calling it progress. The baseline 40‑hour week is a paternalistic relic, not a natural right—the kind of rule a central planner believes will prevent exploitation, while actually narrowing the range of freely negotiated contracts. If workers and firms want longer days, they should be free to strike those deals without a state imprimatur; if they don’t, they shouldn’t be forced into a schedule they dislike. The state’s involvement here is a slippery slope toward micromanaging labor time, and that is exactly what Hayek warned about when he spoke of the knowledge problem: a legislature cannot possibly know the right balance of hours for every vocation, firm, region, or individual. Market processes, not decrees, reveal the true prices of time, risk, and capability.

From Nozick’s standpoint, the only legitimate function of the state is to protect person and property rights and to enforce voluntary agreements. A law that creates a framework for extending daily hours—even if optional in theory—amounts to the state shaping the terms of labor contracts, which is not a rightful exercise of political power. If an employer and an employee freely consent to a longer day, that is their private arrangement, not a matter for bureaucratic sanction or subsidization. The real protection of rights comes when the state stops interfering in the details of how two adults choose to allocate their time and earnings. A policy framed as protecting workers and reducing underground work is, in effect, a paternalistic supposition about what people ought to want, not a defense of their liberty to contract.

Rand would insist that this is another instance of the state meddling in rational self‑interest by disguising coercion as benevolence. If individuals freely assess risks, rewards, and personal capacities, they should be able to enter or refuse any work arrangement without moralizing slogans about “rights at stake.” The 40‑hour week and the push toward shorter hours have nothing to do with rights grounded in reason; they are social engineering aimed at molding behavior to suit a political narrative. The remedy is to shrink the state’s footprint on labor entirely and trust private contracts, insurance markets, safety standards protected by voluntary compliance, and competitive pressures to discipline exploitative practices—not more rules that presume to know better than workers and managers what they should endure.

Hayek would add that even the best‑intentioned regulation distorts the delicate balance of incentives that coordinate production and employment. A flexible 13‑hour option, presented as a market fix for vacancies, will still channel decisions through a brittle legal framework that is blind to local conditions, sectoral needs, and the individual risk calculus of thousands of workers. The result may be increased inefficiencies, safety tradeoffs, or a shift toward shadow work in places where the law’s friction makes formal arrangements costly. If the goal is to reduce underground work and improve labor outcomes, the answer is not a new permission slip for longer days but freer markets: fewer constraints on contracting, clearer property rights, better liability rules, and more reliable information flowing from voluntary, competitive exchanges rather than from bureaucrats.

In sum, this proposal should be rejected as another step toward legitimizing state direction of the most intimate sphere of life: how we spend our time and how we trade it for wages. The proper libertarian response is to embrace true freedom of contract, not a rebranding of paternalism. Abolish or at least radically shrink the baselines and caps that tell workers how to allocate their days; let wages, hours, and conditions be determined by voluntary agreements, private risk assessment, and competitive pressures. If a market wants longer days on certain terms, it will figure it out without a government mandate. If it doesn’t, it will adapt in other ways. The answer to shortages and underground work is not more state direction but more liberty to contract, more respect for individual rights, and less meddling by those who mistake power for protection.