Freedom Study

Socialist Pathfinders

Maryland My Christmas Tree

A comprehensive study of  freedom in the United States  offered some surprises.  Maryland being dead last in personal freedoms, and Alaska at the top were not among them.  Colorado and South Dakota among the top three freest is intuitively startling.  So I'm not so smart after all.  I haven't read it yet, but I'm betting there's lots of good blog fodder here. Wait a minute .... Okay, I just wanted to see if today's New York Times acknowledged New York's status as overall Most Oppressive State in the Union.  It didn't. Mega thanks, and and a coupon for two bourbon Manattans,  to rockville for the tip. “ Abstract 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 other individuals’ ability to do the same. 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. New York is the least free by a considerable margin, followed by New Jersey, Rhode Island, California and Maryland. On personal freedom alone, Alaska is the clear winner, while Maryland brings up the rear. As for freedom in the different regions of the country, the Mountain and West North Central regions are the freest overall while the Middle Atlantic lags far behind on both economic and personal freedom. Regression analysis demonstrates that states enjoying more economic and personal freedom tend to attract substantially higher rates of internal net migration. ”