According to Heritage's Economic Freedom Index, the US economy is no longer classified as "Free (market)" but now as "mostly free": http://www.heritage.org/index/country/unitedstates
note: I have no idea if the source we're talking about is repeatable or verifiable.
Edit: from Wikipedia:
> An ad hominem (Latin for "to the man" or "to the person"[1]), short for argumentum ad hominem, is a general category of fallacies in which a claim or argument is rejected on the basis of some irrelevant fact about the author of or the person presenting the claim or argument.
Note that "irrelevant fact" does not really apply here since the political biases of an organization publishing a political index are very much relevant to the discussion.
For example: http://www.heritage.org/index/government-spending
The position that more government spending always means less freedom is a political one, as is their choice of growth curve.
> The scale for scoring government spending is non-linear, which means that government spending that is close to zero is lightly penalized, while levels of government spending that exceed 30 percent of GDP lead to much worse scores in a quadratic fashion (for example, doubling spending yields four times less freedom). Only extraordinarily large levels of government spending—for example, over 58 percent of GDP—receive a score of zero.
Let's take a look at labor freedom: http://www.heritage.org/index/labor-freedom and http://www.doingbusiness.org/methodology/employing-workers
Now we see that that economic freedom in this case actually means freedom for employers to exploit their workers, with negative factors like "rigidity of hours" being determined by paid vacation days. Yet nowhere are factors like regulations on non-compete and no-moonlighting employment clauses factored in. So again a political opinion on what freedom of labor means - the freedom to exploit labor rather than the freedom of labor to seek work or change jobs.
Ad hominem circumstantial points out that someone is in circumstances such that they are disposed to take a particular position. Ad hominem circumstantial constitutes an attack on the bias of a source. This is fallacious because a disposition to make a certain argument does not make the argument false;
Essentially, you can't discount everything a particular entity says because you or others perceive them as biased. If you disagree with their position, attack the position, not the person.
That's the way to deal with arguments from authority but some posters were very charitable anyway and gave more analysis than original claim deserved.
Ad-hominem refers to dismissing specific points/arguments based on who made them. Dismissing an argument from authority this way is actually correct way to handle it. The difference I hope is obvious. The other poster is wrong, misuses common terms and to top it is arrogant about it that's why he is downvoted.
You are lazily dismissing their data and workings by attacking their character (politically bias) - the very essence of an Ad-hominem fallacy.
Economic freedom is a great predictor of GDP per capita. So there is some law of (human) nature down in there somewhere: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-dX5-CL7Zaac/TZfhtnxCz0I/AAAAAAAAAa...
"The property rights component is a qualitative assessment"
They score the US as an 80. Based on their own ratings, I think the US should be a 90.
The [Fiscal Freedom] score is derived from three quantitative factors:
The top marginal tax rate on individual income, The top marginal tax rate on corporate income, and The total tax burden as a percentage of GDP."
That is pure ideological bullshit. Total tax burden as a % of GDP is an actual measure, but why is the only marginal tax rate that matters the top one? The difference in marginal tax rate is actually larger at other steps in the US Tax code, but they want to focus solely on the top one? Also, why measure the marginal corporate tax rate but not the effective corporate tax rate (as they correctly do for personal taxes).
The "Business Freedom" index is trying to measure how much regulation there is - which is what you would think this entire ranking is about. It does a pretty poor job of it, though I think this is a hard task.
It goes downhill from there. Thanks for the providing the link, it proves the original point that the index is ideological nonsense very well.
The methodology's way to assign numeric values to things doesn't relate to intrinsic things about the objects under study, but rather, is a numeric score reflecting the subjective opinion of the reviewer.
That something uses numbers doesn't make it objective, and this is a prime example.
Keep reading. They explain the intrinsic things that make up the numbers they assign to the objects. Eg:
"Each country’s property rights score is assessed according to the following criteria:
100—Private property is guaranteed by the government. The court system enforces contracts efficiently and quickly. The justice system punishes those who unlawfully confiscate private property. There is no corruption or expropriation.
90—Private property is guaranteed by the government. The court system enforces contracts efficiently. The justice system punishes those who unlawfully confiscate private property. Corruption is nearly nonexistent, and expropriation is highly unlikely."Those are subjective criteria, to decide if a country not only "efficiently" settles a matter, but it also does so "quickly".
Similarly, there's not a single country where we'd find there is literally "no corruption", which means it's just a subjectively strong form of "nearly nonexistent", or where we'd find there is "no expropriation" ever in its history, as opposed to it just being "highly unlikely" to happen to you.
These subjective differences account for the difference between a 90/100 and 100/100. So if your example was that only 10% of the score depends on the difference between a figurative "no corruption" and "nearly nonexistent" corruption, you've done a very poor job convincing me it's an objective test.
Allow me to translate what tobinfricke said:
"The Heritage Foundation is hardly an objective source on the topic of the advantages of the so-called 'free market', considering the fact that they are an organization dedicated principally to promulgating and evangelizing the concept of the 'free market' (by which they essentially mean a market in which the regulatory structures that benefit incumbent businesses are preserved, but new regulatory frameworks that would affect the status quo are discouraged). Oh and, here's a link to some basic information on the topic.
If I were to say to you that Frito-Lay is not an objective source about whether Doritos are delicious and healthy, that does not actually meet the criteria for argumentum ad hominem.