US Economic Liberty Has Been Sinking for Sixteen Years
mercury.postlight.com
mercury.postlight.com
size of government: expenditures, taxes, and enterprises
legal structure and security of property rights
access to sound money
freedom to trade internationally; and
regulation of credit, labor, and business
This is of course a libertarian point of view. Personally, I have found that Obamacare subsidies have given me the freedom to start a business without putting my family at risk, that inflation can be rooted in technological supply-side or demand-side shocks, and that regulations like nutritional information requirements make me more free by giving me more information.
With this understanding, the USA is more "economically free" than at any point in my lifetime.
Freedom or liberty has to be defined negatively (e.g. absence of constraints) and precisely to have any objective meaning at all.
The “robber barons” are their heroes and their dream is a return to the Gilded Age.
Labeling this “freedom” is a pretty cute bit of rhetorical gymnastics.
Jane Mayer’s recent work is recommended reading on this subject: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0385535597
Or if you want something shorter, from a few years ago, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/08/30/covert-operatio...
You may want to study property rights (protection from pollution) and freedom of speech (publishing studies).
I don't know about the Koch bros, but libertarians are the most anti-corporate people you can find, precisely because government and corporations collude to destroy individual rights and freedom.
You may want to stop reading your lefty media if you are to retain any intellectual capacity.
They'll push for repealing environmental protection laws, but not for the tort laws that reduce their liability for polluting. They'll push for repealing regulations that are advantageous for unions, but not "Right to Work" laws that prevent unions and businesses from forming contracts requiring all laborers to be part of the union.
For example, you might define property rights as the negative freedom to do what you want with your property (property as defined by government, btw. e.g. humans are mostly not allowed to be property anymore. Or, the groundwater below your land might or might not be your property in your jurisdiction.). Alternatively, you could define property rights as the positive freedom of being able to peacefully enjoy your property, which could require the government to protect your property in various ways such as defending you against illegitimate claimants to the property.
I happen to think that, in aggregate, the current system of the government forcibly removing some property from everyone to provide a system in which the remainder of the property is protected under the rule of law preserves a larger fraction of property rights than a more theoretically pure system free from such coercion would be.
I may be wrong about this, or I may be right, but I think it is hard to prove either way, as we do not have a sufficient understanding of social dynamics to argue from simulation or first-principles, and empirical data have too many confounding variables.
[1] http://www.freetheworld.com/2016/economic-freedom-of-the-wor...
>Individuals have economic freedom when property they acquire without the use of force...
So we'll be giving north American back to the Indians? Or do we consider any slow-down of that North Dakota pipeline a gross violation of freedom of the innocent oil industry?
Consider this report an ideologically motivated propaganda piece rather than a serious analysis.
The most significant "lawful" forces that hurt economic liberty are regulations, price fixing, and certification. They vary in intensity from having to put ingredients on the bottle to outright banning incandescent lightbulbs, from corn subsidies to fixed rates in medicare, and from getting a drivers license to getting an MD.
But they are all barriers to economic participation and malleability. But they exist for reasons - to reduce exploitation in the system.
Those social safety nets, that in theory could be taking an economically uniform portion of productivity and thus have their minimal impact, also reduce the ability for people to be exploited. Loan sharks and get thin quick schemes are modern, legal forms of exploitation, but historically bad food products, dangerous housing and machinery, and outright extortion were all exploitation schemes the regulation machine reduces.
But if you have a strong enough safety net to keep people out of the desperation trap of needing money or resources to sustain their livelihood you can also eliminate swathes of the regulation that restricts markets without negatively harming those at most risk for being taken advantage of, because the state institution provides a floor on what the worst possible outcomes can be.
It is very similar to how easy credit creates business opportunity. Without credit, you cannot have a foundation to start out on if you have nothing in the first place. In the same way, either Scandanavian style socialism or the UBI proposals floating around can provide the foundation to enable more general economic freedom above it.
It is impossible to feel free when you are restricted to the bottom of Maslow's heirarchy. Maximal freedom comes from the top, where you have access to the full breadth of your potential. But any time you slip down to the bottom rungs again you are forced to contend with those, because survival trumps self-actualization. If you want to maximize for personal liberty of all forms, including economic, you need to make sure nobody is getting trapped down there.
This is what happens when you start with faulty definitions.
Orwellian at best.
We all know from experience how much harder and more time-consuming it is to correct errors than make them in the first place—that's a big problem with internet discourse in general—but posting uncivil and/or unsubstantive replies isn't a solution.
Edit: unfortunately looks like you've been doing this repeatedly. This one is worse: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12519373. Please stop posting like that.
>But if you have a strong enough safety net to keep people out of the desperation trap of needing money or resources to sustain their livelihood you can also eliminate swathes of the regulation that restricts markets without negatively harming those at most risk for being taken advantage of, because the state institution provides a floor on what the worst possible outcomes can be.
I can't really reconcile these. Worst case scenario for not putting ingredients on a bottle? Death. Worst case scenario for being treated by an unlicensed MD? Death. Not requiring a drivers license? Death. Even the lightbulb one - death, in a few decades, from flooding.
Specifically what kinds of regulation can you get rid of?
What you are talking about is not "freedom". It is collective insurance.
That may be efficient and convenient if done properly. But it has nothing to do with freedom. Read other posts...
US combines the worst of two worlds in so many ways.
Sweden at least does "socialism" correct in some areas.
Businesses in the US are often free to impose all sorts of draconian contracts on you wish limits your freedom in many ways. E.g. anti-competitive clauses are common in the US. E.g. you can't work at at a competing company when you quite for quite some time.
The problem with American "freedom" is that it is often too much freedom to take away your freedoms. Scandinavia tends to give less freedom to private enterprise to take away freedom from you or others. Freedom is a complicated concept. It is much like tolerance. It is very hard to have a tolerant society which tolerates intolerance.
If it's something you agree with, then no need to check and see who did the work. It stands on its own.
Also the link you just posted is bordering on garbage. Why wouldn't you just link the wiki?
More annoying than that is that it's extremely difficult to open a bank account overseas because of FATCA. It's less costly to deny Americans service than to comply with the US' reporting requirements.
> While there are some tax credits that lessen this burden
Not like it makes it much better. "We're going to completely fuck you over, but here's a small concession."
I suspect you're wrong that $100k covers the majority of expats, but even if you are, it's not like it's much better to fuck over a minority of expats.
Actually that site sends me to another site [-] which asks for an email (over plain http). That's as far as I'm willing to take it, but I'm curious to know if anyone is able/willing to pull the dataset.
Or, is this only relevant to the very rich?
Or, is it similar to how Fox News characters talk about 'freedom'? (that is, much different than what I think of freedom).
I suspect these sorts of rankings is just made to further a libertarian agenda.
After all putting in restrictions, like you can't own people, is restricting economic "freedom" in some way :-D
It is a they say, economists know the price of everything but the value of nothing.
Personally I wouldn't want to live there any more but I think the government generally has the support of a large majority of the population and it's definitely raised the standard of living dramatically and sustainably.
It's easy to look at its free port tax regime and say "liberal!" But it's economically very illiberal.
But there's a good chance that the world would be more productive as a whole. Governments typically trade economic productivity (by increasing friction) for ostensible social benefits (via tax-funded programs). Of course, it's not clear if this tradeoff always works out, because governments may spend sub-optimally or divert funds towards things like war.
Governments often increase productivity. Try investing in a country with no laws, education, or infrastructure. They can also help make an economy more efficient by maximizing positive externalities and minimizing negative ones. Social benefits can also be beneficial economically as an externality. Companies don't have the incentive to keep someone from starving or to educate them from kindergarten, but having a larger, more educated work force certainly benefits the economy as a whole.
Has "eventually" happened yet? US tax policy has gotten worse in recent years; give it some time.
>Instead, it's companies in higher tax countries that are the largest.
The biggest companies are in the US, which is a huge country with lots of historical capital. There are hundreds of reasons big companies tend to be here, and you haven't demonstrated that excessive taxes are one of them.
Interestingly, many young tech companies like Google have their EU HQs (and sometimes global HQs) in Ireland for tax reasons.
So if I open a store and sell you a computer for less than the next store over, am I leeching from my neighbors?
A better comparison to your computer analogy would be a company that sells knock-offs and counterfeit products. Trying to just reap the rewards without doing the hard work to get there.
Consider the opposite.
"Now with free education and free golf lessons I have so much more freedom".
This is essentially nonsensical. This concept of "freedom" can be taken to mean anything you like, and deliberately hides the other side of the transaction. Namely, the tutors who are coerced to teach you math and golf. Or, if they are paid, the people who are taxed to pay for your "freedom" while receiving no benefit whatsoever.
The same goes for social safety nets and the rest. It is telling that these basic moral concepts are not spread in our society today. This year US may well get Trumped. Next time it will be Berned (literally).
Regarding the whole freedom from coercion argument. My question would be: isn't private property itself essentially enforced by government coercion? How is the freedom to not pay taxes any more sacred than the freedom to not being stopped by police if I steal from someone else?
Taxation is constitutive of the concept of a modern state. Now, we can discuss the pro's and con's of specific programs, the amount of taxation needed to fund them, how progressive such taxation needs to be and whether the benefits are worth the costs. I can say that I think socialized education is definitely worth it, and you can tell me that you don't believe it is, and tax policy results from democratic compromise among many such points of view. But the whole "taxation is morally wrong because it implies state coercion" argument is absurd, private property implies state coercion too and I have seen few libertarians suggest it should go away (in that sense, I believe full-on Anarchists have a more self-consistent view, even if I still don't agree with it).
Yes. Absolutely. This point (which was first made so clear to me by Matt Bruenig) needs to be repeated over and over, loudly, over the delusions of the libertarian crowd (whose ideology might more accurately be named "propertarian"...).