Massachusetts. Live Free Or Here.
All numbers taken from the Mercatus Center study referenced by SayUncle, Alphecca, Bruce, and many others. From the intro:
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.
Onto the data...
Table I: Fiscal Policy Ranking
23. Massachusetts 0.02
This is the best showing MA gets. A little better than halfway...
Table II: Regulatory Policy Ranking
43. Massachusetts -0.15
Hmmm. 43rd out of 50. Sounds about right, if not a little too free for MA. Don't worry, Cadillac Deval will improve that ranking.
Table III: Economic Freedom Ranking
37. Massachusetts -0.133
Oh, with all of the new "fees" being imposed, I doubt we'll stay this low for long...
Table IV: Personal Freedom Ranking
44. Massachusetts -0.109
This one was rather surprising, but not because of MA (although I was surprised to see MA at 44th rather than 48th or 49th...). OH, home of the World's Most Dangerous Librarian, actually has less personal freedom according to this survey. I don't buy it...
Not exactly the numbers one would expect or hope for from the cradle of American liberty, the home of the "shot heard 'round the world" and all...
That is all.
7 comments:
Jay,
I, too, wonder about the personal freedom ranking. Alabama is just above MA. Personal freedom seems to be good. But, I may have a narrow view. Hmm.
Texas Jay... Texas :-) It's warm, it's got lots of land and plenty of ranges!
EmmaPeel,
Yeah, you've gotta wonder what they were smoking to come up with some of those rankings.
Hmmm. Then again, maybe that's part of it...
Old NFO,
Don't rub it in. My last job, I was offered the chance to relocate to San Antonio or take a layoff. Since I had just moved into my house some 9 months prior after 2 years of designing and building, we stayed.
I regret that decision daily...
They also rated Missouri higher than Arizona; which is clearly untrue.
Not that Missouri is bad, but it has a lot of democratic machine regulation etc...
I do so like the fact that they rated my home state as the overall #1 Most Free State In The Nation.
We'll see how much longer that lasts, what with all the refugees from the North Shore flooding up into Southern NH and promptly proceeding to turn their new home into a carbon copy of the place they fled.
Yeah, damn those North Shore bastards... ;)
They're probably weighting things such as homosexual marriage a lot heavier than gun rights and oppressive taxation.
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