It's the government

Some more thoughts on Obama and the nanny state, (most recently exemplified by Rahm Emanuel's expanding on The One's plan for compulsory youth service). Reason's Damon Root:

But what the current vogue for the term progressive fails to acknowledge is that the original progressives embraced the worst abuses of state power in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Libertarians, by contrast, stood as consistent defenders of individual liberty in all spheres of human life.

Consider the Jim Crow South. As historian David Southern has written, disfranchisement, segregation, race baiting, and lynching all "went hand-in-hand with the most advanced forms of southern progressivism." Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Supreme Court decision that enshrined the doctrine of "separate but equal" and serves as perhaps the most potent symbol of the Jim Crow regime, dealt with a Louisiana law forbidding railroads from selling first-class tickets to black customers. That's not the free market making life worse. It's the government.

The free market is the expression of free minds making choices, and entrepreneurs springing up to serve their customers and support their families. There is nothing pernicious about it.

P.S. Peter Robinson, Forbes, "The Loss of Individual Liberty"