The Economic Freedom Index is an index created by the Heritage Foundation itself, not some law of nature. As such it's basically political opinion - how is the organization's political leanings/bias exempt from scrutiny in this case?

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.