With a good enough query planner and optimizer, yes. I'm not sure if that was always the case. I can imagine historically if you were joining on fields that were only indexed in one table and not the other - I'm not saying this is an intelligent thing to do, but it sometimes happens - then controlling the order of the join yourself if the database didn't optimize this for you would be important.
You're setting up a scenario where you'd be in trouble regardless though; controlling the join order would be a local optimization and query would still probably have a table scan, while appropriately indexing would solve any query planner mistakes and give you a more efficient execution in both styles.
But we still don't know if it's more expensive or not...
I'm hitting F5 on this page hoping to find out.
Run explain and find out for yourself. Its highly dependant on your DB and its execution planner