Freedom in the 50 US States: Mercatus Center GMU

Since the earliest days of the North American colonies which later became the United States, residents have voted for freedom with their feet. If they find conditions around them growing intolerable for lack of freedom, they will move to another area. Even within the one nation of the USA, it is possible to find a wide range of personal and economic freedoms.

The Mercatus Center of George Mason University in Virginia has published a free downloadable PDF report: Freedom in the 50 States, which looks at the wide variability of different freedoms between the different states of the US.

This study comprehensively ranks the American states on their public policies that affect individual freedoms in the economic, social, and personal spheres. It updates, expands, and improves upon our inaugural 2009 Freedom in the 50 States study. For this new edition, we have added more policy variables (such as bans on trans fats and the audio recording of police, Massachusetts’s individual health-insurance mandate, and mandated family leave), improved existing measures (such as those for fiscal policies, workers’ compensation regulations, and asset-forfeiture rules), and developed specific policy prescriptions for each of the 50 states based on our data and a survey of state policy experts. With a consistent time series, we are also able to discover for the first time which states have improved and worsened in regard to freedom recently.

Our approach to measuring freedom in the states is unique in three respects: (1) it includes measures of social and personal freedoms such as peaceable citizens’ rights to educate their own children, to own and carry firearms, and to be free from unreasonable search and seizure; (2) it incorporates more than 150 distinct public policies; and (3) it is particularly careful to measure fiscal policies in a way that reflects the true cost of government to the citizen.

We find that the overall freest states in the country are New Hampshire and South Dakota, which together achieve a virtual tie for first place, while New York is the least free by a considerable margin. On personal freedom alone, Oregon now comes first, with Vermont and Nevada not too far behind, and Maryland brings up the rear. On economic freedom alone, South Dakota easily takes first, and New York is a distant last. The most improved states since the last edition of our study are Oregon, Nevada, Maine, and Washington, while Wyoming, California, Arizona, and Massachusetts have fallen the furthest. Two of the most intriguing findings of our statistical analysis are that Americans are voting with their feet and moving to states with more economic and personal freedom and that economic freedom correlates with income growth.

The data used to create the rankings are available online at http://mercatus.org/freedom-50-states-2011, and we invite others to see how the overall state freedom rankings might change given their own weightings of the various public policies. _PDF Freedom in the 50 States Executive Summary PDF

Freedom in the 50 States PDF
More from the Mercatus Center website:

Measuring Freedom & Government Intervention

We explicitly ground our conception of freedom on an individual-rights framework. In our view, individuals should be allowed to dispose of their lives, liberties, and properties as they see fit, as long as they do not infringe on the rights of others.

Fiscal Policy
We divide fiscal policy equally into spending and taxation subcategories. These subcategories are highly interdependent; we include them both as redundant measures of the size of government.

Regulatory Policy
In this study, regulatory policy includes labor regulation, health-insurance coverage mandates, occupational licensing, eminent domain, the tort system, land-use regulation, and utilities. Regulations that seem to have a mainly paternalistic justification, such as home- and private-school regulations, are placed in the paternalism category.

Paternalism
In deciding how to weight personal freedoms, we started from the bottom up, beginning with the freedom we saw as least important in terms of saliency, constitutional implications, and the number of people affected, and working up to the most important.

Ranking & Discussion
By summing the economic freedom and personal freedom scores, we obtain the overall freedom index, presented in table 5. New Hampshire and South Dakota again find themselves in a virtual tie for first.

Conclusion
Although we hope we have demonstrated that some states provide freer environments than others, it would be inappropriate to infer that the freest states necessarily enjoy a libertarian streak, while others suffer from a statist mentality.
_Mercatus Center

As economic conditions continue to grow worse over most of the 50 states under the Obama government, residents and businesses will take closer looks at many of the parameters which are highlighted in the Mercatus Center study. A large portion of new jobs over the past two years, have originated within the top 20 ranked states.

In general, crime rates are lower in states which provide citizens greater personal and economic freedoms. Crime rates and other factors relating to quality of life will need to be considered alongside the freedom ratings when choosing an optimal location, whether in the US or any other country.

Government Unions to Taxpayers: "Me Master! You Slave!"

One can see the economic future of at least half the states and cities of the US, by looking at California. Nowhere in the US is the power of unions so total and uncontested, and nowhere is the Democratic Party so dominant. And nowhere in the US is the economic future so rutted into a predictable  path to total collapse. The complete fusion of government unions with the US Democratic Party presents a picture of corruption and an apparent impossibility for meaningful reform which staggers the logical mind.

The Democratic Party has folded Sacramento into one of the tightest one-party grips in contemporary American politics. In November, bucking the national trend, Democrats in California won not just the governorship but 51 Assembly seats to Republicans’ 29, 24 state Senate seats to Republicans’ 14, and every statewide office. With the passage of a referendum lowering the number of legislative votes required to approve a state budget (from a two-thirds majority to a simple majority), California is that rarest of land masses for the 2011 Democratic Party: conquered territory. State Democrats have freedom to rule virtually unchallenged by the scattered, rusticated Republicans.

As 72-year-old Jerry Brown enters his second governorship, he has an agenda to match that power, with visions even greater than those that haunted his two-term administration of the 1970s and ’80s: building 20,000 megawatts of renewable power, laying a new high-speed rail network that will connect the state’s major cities, forging a statewide infrastructure for alternative energy, hiring thousands of green employees. The new governor’s environmental agenda is ambitious, untenably expensive, and indelibly popular with voters and lawmakers.

Yet when Brown looks out on Democrat-controlled California, he seems less like Caesar at the Rubicon than Wojciech Jaruzelski at the Gdansk Shipyard. Brown is champion of a workers’ party with monopoly control, yet all his plans are being derailed by a labor movement nobody can harness. _Reason

The unions’ political triumphs have molded a California in which government workers thrive at the expense of a struggling private sector. The state’s public school teachers are the highest-paid in the nation. Its prison guards can easily earn six-figure salaries. State workers routinely retire at 55 with pensions higher than their base pay for most of their working life. Meanwhile, what was once the most prosperous state now suffers from an unemployment rate far steeper than the nation’s and a flood of firms and jobs escaping high taxes and stifling regulations. This toxic combination—high public-sector employee costs and sagging economic fortunes—has produced recurring budget crises in Sacramento and in virtually every municipality in the state. _CityJournal

California may be more beholden to government unions than most US states, but it is far from alone. Michigan, Ohio, New Jersey, Illinois, New York, and a score of other states are deeply wrapped within the web of government union power, and may find it ultimately impossible to escape doom.

...public-sector workers are spoiled rotten. Government employees earn 21% more than private ones and are 24% more likely to have access to health care. Only 21% of private workers enjoy a defined-benefit (DB) pension, which guarantees retirement income based on years of service and final salary. But 84% of state and local workers still receive DB plans.

All this might be grand if states and cities could afford it, but they cannot; unlike the federal government, they have the pesky obligation to balance their budgets. The recession has already drained pension funds. _Economist

US governments are corrupted by ties to government unions from the top to the bottom. Good government is impossible under these conditions, much less a viable economic plan for commercial prosperity.

The enslavement of taxpayers by government unions is virtually complete in California, and at least a handful of other states. But the Obama government wants to put every US state into the same position as California and Illinois. It is not clear that the nation could recover from such a disastrous plan, if achieved.

More: Even the NYTimes is beginning to see the handwriting on the wall for government unions. Anyone still pro government union by now, simply has no brain. Such people are generally referred to as zombies, in the age of Obama. ;-)

Must We Kill All Tort Lawyers Before We Can Go Into Space?

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Over at NextBigFuture, Brian Wang looks at the supply and demand economics of space colonisation. Brian points to a more extensive posting by Paul Gilster at Centauri Dreams, "The Economics of Space Infrastructure." Brian and Paul are correctly looking at the economic costs and benefits of space infrastructure and space colonies. But the topic goes far beyond mere economics.

Science Fiction author Charles Stross downplays arguments in favour of space colonies as "quasi-religious." Physicist Stephen Hawking wishes for humans to colonise Mars and Luna, as a way to preserve the human race and Terrestrial life, should Earth be destroyed by comets, asteroids, geologic catatrophe or other forms of massive upheaval. Physicist Freeman Dyson has thought along similar lines since the mid-1960s. The idea of "not having all of one's eggs in a single basket" appeals to the long term thinker who wishes the human enterprise to be ultimately successful.

Humans appear to possess an "exploratory instinct," a natural urge to explore. From the very beginning, humans have been willing to risk what they have, in order to find something more. The urge for outer space is another manifestation of this instinct.

At times it may seem that we have lost this exploratory urge, but always it returns, reshaped by current events. Why is it that we strive to understand our place in the heavens and seek other intelligences out there? _Planetary

Exploration is risky. Explorers often die. In an outward-looking, exploratory society, the acceptance of risk is so commonplace as to become second nature. Such a society will spawn many explorers, and many pioneers who are willing to follow close behind the explorer to create a more settled life in the new, risk-filled territories.

Modern affluent societies become more risk-averse, more fixed on security over time. This security-fixation often approaches pathological levels, depending upon whether it becomes accepted and codified within legal, cultural, educational, and legislative institutions.

In modern western nations -- particularly the US -- risk aversion in the form of tort is often costing societies their birthright and their future.

Economists have long understood that America's tort system acts as a serious drag on our nation's economy. Although many excellent studies have been conducted, no single work has fully captured the true total costs, both static and dynamic, of excessive litigation.

The good news: We now have some reliable figures. The bad news: The costs are far higher than anyone imagined.

Based on our estimates, and applying the best available scholarly research, we believe America's tort system imposes a total cost on the U.S. economy of $865 billion per year. This constitutes an annual "tort tax" of $9,827 on a family of four.

...litigation doesn't just transfer wealth, it also changes behavior, and often in economically unproductive ways. Any true estimate of the costs of America's tort system must also include these dynamic costs of litigation -- the impact on research and development spending, the costs of defensive medicine and the related rise in health-care spending and reduced access to health care, and the loss of output from deaths due to excess liability. _WSJ

Most recent attention to tort reform in the US has focused upon medical tort. But the economic destruction of out-of-control US tort law is felt in every part of society, industry, and the economy. In a society ruled by tyranny of tort, all risk is punished pro-actively. In other words, most great ventures are never even attempted, due to the tight noose of tort -- and other effects of excess government -- around the necks of entire societies. As of 2006, costs of tort in the US had been growing at an average rate of almost 10% annually PDF.

In order to advance, humans must take risks. The elimination of risk from society is also the elimination of growth and advancement. Eliminating risk means inevitable stagnation and decline. It is the great human dieoff by backdoor means, albeit in slow motion form -- at first. Decline has a way of accelerating, however, once it passes a certain point.

Massive -- and still growing -- bureaucracies of government shut in most possibilities of escape from this inbuilt decline. When humans are cut off from expressing their natural instincts, they tend to rebel if they can. Eventually, they grow passive, fatalistic.

It appears as if western educational, news media, and entertainment systems are dedicated to the suppression of the exploratory urge in humans. This society-wide trap appears to be closing more tightly every year, with every pseudo-cause and crusade such as carbon hysteria, or resource scarcity doom.

How can we escape this suffocating atmosphere of security-fixation and excessive risk-aversion? There are few ways to escape other than to emigrate to a less regulated nation, or to build a seastead. Every so often a few people try to start a new country, where they can set their own rules so as to allow greater personal freedoms. Of course, new countries in space -- on the moon, Mars, in the asteroid belt, and beyond -- would represent a big step up from previous efforts.

But people will die in the attempt to establish a permanent human presence and economy in space. That is inevitable. People die in hazardous environments on Earth every day, and outer space is far more hazardous than almost anywhere on Earth. Whenever there is a chance of people dying, lawyers flock like flies on excrement.

We can see in the inability of advanced societies to develop a larger, safer, cleaner nuclear power industry, how tort lawyers combined with government regulators drive up costs to the point of abandonment of multi-billion dollar enterprises and loss of future plans and possibilities.

Established powers aim to remain established powers. That is what the vast inbred and corrupt system of government and law has become in the west. Free humans are hemmed in and restricted. Economies stagnate and the human spirit dies a little with every new encroachment by government and its army of allied extortionists.

People do emigrate to Costa Rica and other small countries where there may be less intrusive regulation and more freedom of activity in many ways. Other people "go Galt" and drop out, go off the grid as it were. Expect to see more of that unless something drastic occurs to reverse the creeping strangulation of the government-legal- quasi organised crime complex.

Can SpaceX and other private space companies provide an escape from the ongoing choking of human freedom in the developed world? Even if improvements in technology allowed the costs of space launch were to come down enough to make travel to the moon economical for middle class incomes, the inbred risk-aversion of modern societies places a limit on how far the movement could progress -- without massive changes in western government and legal systems.

Must we kill all tort lawyers and their fellows in crime, before the human instinct to explore and pioneer can find an outlet in space?

Is Obama's America Losing Its Grip on Freedom?

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Economic freedom allows people to move up the economic ladder under their own initiative. It is the main reason why immigrants come to the US and other relatively free nations: to make a better life. But under Obama, it is becoming much harder to create new businesses and jobs. Everyone is becoming equal in poverty. Inequality plus socioeconomic mobility would be far preferable.

Bill Beach, director of the Heritage Foundation's Center for Data Analysis, which compiles the index with The Wall Street Journal, says the index defines "economic freedom" to mean: "You can follow your dreams, express yourself, create a business, do whatever job you want. Government doesn't run labor markets, or plan what business you can open, or over-regulate you."

We asked Beech about the U.S. ranking. "For first time in 16 years, the United States fell from the 'totally free' to 'mostly free' group. That's a terrible development," he said. He fears that if this continues, productive people will leave the United States for freer pastures.

"The United States has been this magnet for three centuries. But today money and people can move quickly, and in less than a lifetime a great country can go by the wayside."

Why is the United States falling behind? "Our spending has been excessive. ... We have the highest corporate tax rate in the world. (Government) takeovers of industries, subsidizing industries ... these are the kinds of moves that happen in Third World countries. ..."

Beach adds that the rule of law declined when the Obama administration declared some contracts to be null and void. For example, bondholders in the auto industry were forced to the back of the creditor line during bankruptcy. And there's more regulation of business, such as the Dodd-Frank law for the financial industry and the new credit-card law. But how could the United States place behind Canada? Isn't Canada practically a socialist country?

"Canada might do health care the wrong way," Beach said, "but by and large they do things the right way." Lately, Canada has lowered tax rates and reduced spending. _Reason

The Obama Pelosi agenda is still in its early stages. Give them time, and they will push the US well down in the rankings of economic freedom -- right next to Cuba and Venezuela. When you put it that way, the US Tea Party movement is looking better and better.