Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

Freedom In the 50 States study

By

No matter what your political stripes, this recent study should be a fascinating read.  The state-by-state profiles are a hoot.  For the lazy, the top 10 freest states are:

1. New Hampshire, 2. Colorado, 3. South Dakota, 4. Idaho, 5. Texas, 6. Missouri, 7. Tennessee, 8. Arizona, 9. Virginia, 10. North Dakota.

The bottom 10 are:

#50. New York, 49. New Jersey, 48. Rhode Island, 47. California, 46. Maryland, 45. Hawaii, 44. Washington, 43. Massachusetts, 42. Illinois, 41. Connecticut, and to round out New England, Vermont is 40th Maine is 39th.

Interesting, Massachusetts has a lower-than-average in tax burden, but apparently one of the highest debt-to-state GDP ratios.

The most fascinating part of this publication are the scatter graphs, especially the fitted line in Figure 4 (pdf page 23) showing freedom correlated with citizen ideology, i.e., the bluer the state, the less free.

If you have an argument, it’ll be in how the authors rate freedom (their methodology is fully explained.) For example, they consider fewer gun restrictions to be better.  Another example is community rating for health insurance; less is better while liberals see this as a positive.  But can you also see it as freedom squashing?

You be the judge.

Please share widely!
fb-share-icon
Tweet
0

Comments

  1. This is what the study boils down to:

    <

    p>(1) A study was commissioned by a conservative/libertarian organization.

    <

    p>(2) The variable explained is notoriously vague (“freedom”), so the authors decided to define the term in a conservative/libertarian manner.

    <

    p>(3) The conservative/libertarian organization then finds that states that are more conservative/libertarian are “more free.”

    <

    p>That makes this study about as “fascinating” and unexpected as Rush Limbaugh claiming that liberals are Satans and conservatives are paragons of all that is right and good.

      • Well, bostonshepherd links to the study, which I looked through and you are welcome to as well. It’s by the “Mercatus Center” (at George Mason U.), which is a right-wing think-tank.

        <

        p>I’m not sure what other “conjecture” you refer to — the link to the study, with methodology, is right there.

        • and didn’t see anything about it being a right wing think tank.  Is it right wing or libertarian?  You said libertarian before but they aren’t the same thing.  

      • would you like to explain why you decided to dis hoyapaul without even a precursory glance at the study?

        <

        p>

        This paper presents the first-ever comprehensive ranking of the American states
        on their public policies affecting individual freedoms in the economic, social, and
        personal spheres. We develop and justify our ratings and aggregation procedure on
        explicitly normative criteria, defining individual freedom as the ability to dispose of
        one’s own life, liberty, and justly acquired property however one sees fit, so long as one
        does not coercively infringe on another individual’s ability to do the same.

        This study improves on prior attempts to score economic freedom for American states
        in three primary ways: (1) it includes measures of social and personal freedoms such
        as peaceable citizens’ rights to educate their own children, own and carry firearms,
        and be free from unreasonable search and seizure; (2) it includes far more variables,
        even on economic policies alone, than prior studies, and there are no missing data on
        any variable; and (3) it uses new, more accurate measurements of key variables, par-
        ticularly state fiscal policies.

        • defining individual freedom as the ability to dispose of
          one’s own life, liberty, and justly acquired property however one sees fit, so long as one
          does not coercively infringe on another individual’s ability to do the same.

          <

          p>So as a liberal, you disagree with that?  

          • Read the study first, and then make comments like these. The study is hardly a “neutral” study of that hard-to-define concept of “freedom”. Read the study, look at what they consider to count as “anti-freedom” laws.

            <

            p>Hint: this included environmental regulations and unionization laws (around pg. 11). My favorite: “Local government wages are here considered better lower than higher” (also pg. 11). So a state is more “free” if their local government employees are paid less.

  3. Right away in the executive summary:

    <

    p>”We find that the freest states in the country are New Hampshire, Colorado, and South Dakota, which together achieve a virtual tie for first place. All three states feature low taxes and government spending and middling levels of regulation and paternalism.”

    <

    p>Defining freedom as a tax issue shows their bent.  By these standards, Afghanistan might be the freest place on earth.

    • I asked Mercatus to supply me a list of freest countries, and this is what I got:

      <

      p>1. Somalia
      2. Afghanistan
      3. Dem. Rep. of the Congo
      4. Chad
      5. Cote D’Ivoire

      <

      p>However, they are feeling “optimistic” about the recent increase in freedom (the liberal media calls it “mayhem“) in Guinea-Bissau.

Archives