[Infowarrior] - Report: Index of Personal and Economic Freedom

[Richard Forno]

Freedom in the 50 States: Index of Personal and Economic Freedom
William P. Ruger and Jason Sorens

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.

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; 3) we adopt new, more accurate  
measurements of key variables, particularly state fiscal policies.

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.

The data used to create the rankings are publicly available online at www.statepolicyindex.com 
, and we invite others to adopt their own weights to see how the  
overall state freedom rankings change.

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http://www.statepolicyindex.com/?page_id=143