Freedom in the Fifty States - An Index of Personal and Economic Freedom

Some of us disagree.

"How would you have done it? What issues would you have selected?"

The most important things I would look at are education outcomes of the first and second quartile (of household income) and the diversity of employment available.

I would also look at pollution levels, highway fatality rates, incarceration rates, certain crime rates, certain disease rates, services received for those dreaded taxes, entertainment and cuisine options, we could go on...

Big towns don't become cities and cities don't become big cities and big cities don't turn into metropolii through coercion. They're big because people run away from South Dakota and never go back. Freely.

Individual freedom is a restriction upon xenophobic groups; economic freedom shifts the needle in favor of those with the capital; emancipation grants rights to slaves and strips them from slaveowners. The water flows the other way too: you can talk about the "freedom" of Kim Jong Il or Stalin to murder their own people.

The entire political discourse in this country (and, to some extent, HN) will be frozen until we can move past merely reciting mechanically that helping one group comes at the expense of hurting some other group. If we put half as much energy into either throughly examining the moral underpinnings of which groups should be elevated or abased[3], or empirically studying the possible utilitarian effects of this[4] as we spend reciting talking points at each other, we would have a great many of the world's problems already solved.

[1] Understand that I'm trying to be morally neutral here, "freedom" and "authority" are being used descriptively, not prescriptively. Obviously a great many of us have strong opinions that slavery is bad, etc.

[2] By this I mean in any individual exchange, you are taking freedom from one group and are assigning an equal amount of freedom to another group. Human perception can differ a great deal: punishing a murderer has an enormous negative burden upon an individual, but it has an equal and opposite impact to society at large, albeit amortized over a great number of people. This can be hard to see in some cases. Also, I am not claiming that a policy in the long run cannot raise all ships; that is a function of tenth-order consequences, and I (and the parent) are talking about first-order ones.

[3] And by this I mean: is it right to take something from this group and give it to this other group? Under what circumstances? Is inequality bad? Is it bad in proportion to the amount of inequality? Is it still bad if everyone has a sufficient floor of resources that meets their basic needs? These are interesting questions; our current political discourse is not.

[4] And by this I mean: What are some local maxima and non-local maxima for economic output as a function of regulation? If we plot creative output as a function of IP law, what will the graph look like? Can we do empirical studies to confirm or refute the underlying basis for legislation (controlling phenylephrine reducing methamphetamine production, for example)? These are elevating questions that inspire us to learn about our world. We are nowhere close to having this kind of conversation.

If economic or personal freedom were any indicators of success, I'd expect it to at least be better than average (it is quite a bit below, $47,275/person for the whole US and $37,375 for South Dakota).