It's impossible to take into account every law. Many of those issues impact personal freedom. Government regulation of personal freedom is a fine gauge for overall freedom.
How would you have done it? What issues would you have selected?
How would you have done it? What issues would you have selected?
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.
* which may be the direct result of a lack of regulation. See: Montana.
The corporation polluting your water source is encroaching on my freedoms. People that break into your house encroach on your freedoms. People that breath smoke in public areas that give other people cancer encroach on our freedom.
More saliently for me freedom involves fundamental choices. People want to say what they want, read what they want, go where they want, do what they want, eat what they want. Kids that are undereducated have their choices (read: freedom) massively curtailed. People that live in an area where everyone is a farmer have their choices (read: freedom) massively curtailed. If I want to get thai food for dinner and there's no thai restaurant for 300 miles my choices have been curtailed. If the local library doesn't stock Harry Potter my freedoms have been limited. If the internet is too crappy for netflix my freedom is limited compared to elsewhere.
They aren't the same thing and insisting that they are just makes it hard to talk about either concept.
Generally when people talk about 'freedom' in a political sense (which is what the original report was about) they are talking about the way government limits actions and not about how your particular circumstances are different than someone else's.
Furthermore, the government plays a big role in _increasing_ the number of choices available to people in the first and second income quartiles, as Steko suggested. Looking only at limitations that government places on freedom reveals your bias.