North Dakota is the freest state in the
U.S., followed closely by South Dakota, Tennessee, New Hampshire, and
Oklahoma, according to the Mercatus Center at George Mason University’s
third annual “Freedom in the 50 States.”
The 223-page report “scores all 50
states on their overall respect for individual freedom, and also on
their respect for three dimensions of freedom considered separately:
fiscal policy, regulatory policy, and personal freedom,” the study explains. Surprisingly, Texas did not make the top 10 and was ranked the 14th most free state.
“In order to calculate these scores, we
weight public policies according to the estimated costs that government
restrictions on freedom impose on their victims,” the report adds.
But how does the report define “freedom”? Again, the study explains its meaning:
We ground our conception of
freedom on an individual rights framework. In our view, individuals
should be allowed to dispose of their lives, liberties, and property as
they see fit, so long as they do not infringe on the rights of others.
This understanding of freedom follows from the natural-rights liberal
thought of John Locke, Immanuel Kant, and Robert Nozick, but it is also
consistent with the rights-generating rule-utilitarianism of Herbert
Spencer and others.
[…]
The freedom index stands within the
tradition in social science of measuring normatively desired phenomena,
such as democracy, civil liberties, and human rights.
Clearly, our index will have intrinsic interest for classical liberals and libertarians.
However, non-libertarian social
scientists will also benefit from the index because it is an open
question how individual liberty relates to phenomena such as economic
growth, migration, and partisan politics in the American states. In the
same way, while political scientists may value democracy for its own
sake, they can also research empirically what causes democracy and how
democracy affects other phenomena.
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