Rick Sincere points me toward this interesting study of the state of individual liberty in each of the 50 States:
This paper presents the first-ever comprehensive ranking of the American states on their public policies affecting individual freedoms in the economic, social, and personal spheres. We develop and justify our ratings and aggregation procedure on explicitly normative criteria, defining individual freedom as the ability to dispose of one’s own life, liberty, and justly acquired property however one sees fit, so long as one does not coercively infringe on other individuals’ ability to do the same.
This study improves on prior attempts to score economic freedom for American states in three primary ways: 1) it includes measures of social and personal freedoms such as peaceable citizens’ rights to educate their own children, own and carry firearms, and be free from unreasonable search and seizure; 2) it includes far more variables, even on economic policies alone, than prior studies, and there are no missing data on any variable; 3) we adopt new, more accurate measurements of key variables, particularly state fiscal policies.
And the results ?
Well, let’s just say that they’re not entirely surprising:
We find that the freest states in the country are New Hampshire, Colorado, and South Dakota, which together achieve a virtual tie for first place. All three states feature low taxes and government spending and middling levels of regulation and paternalism. New York is the least free by a considerable margin, followed by New Jersey, Rhode Island, California and Maryland. On personal freedom alone, Alaska is the clear winner, while Maryland brings up the rear. As for freedom in the different regions of the country, the Mountain and West North Central regions are the freest overall while the Middle Atlantic lags far behind on both economic and personal freedom. Regression analysis demonstrates that states enjoying more economic and personal freedom tend to attract substantially higher rates of internal net migration.
The report also includes this map, which breaks the states down into quintiles from most pro-liberty (bright red) to least (dark blue):
My adopted home state of Virginia is among the few states in the top quintile along with New Hampshire, Tennessee, Texas, Missouri, North and South Dakota, Colorado, Arizona, and Utah.
The state of my birth, New Jersey, is, not surprisingly, at the very bottom.
I’d like to see how these are trending, and see how that matches up up with electoral maps.
You should compare this cap to per capita income by state. It seems to me freedom and PCI might be inversely correlated.
*map, not cap
Conor,
PCI is nominal – it doesn’t prove much in terms of real wealth. Try purchasing power parity (PPP) instead – you may be surprised to see it flip the inverse relationship back to a more direct one.
(Its harder to pay rent on a $200k studio with $11/hr than it is to pay rent on a $80k studio with $7/hr. As such, minimum wage workers are likely to be “better off” in places with lower nominal PCI. Unless you want to argue, for example, that the crowding and scenery in NJ or CA is worth paying a premium for – thats a personal decision)
Conor,
I’ve thought about that problem quite a bit… I think the only states that can get away with being so unfree are states that have a big draw of people coming there anyway. In California it’s the weather, in NY/MA it’s jobs, etc. Places where you know people don’t want to move away from, it’s a lot easier for you to get away with fleecing them.
Doug, you forgot Idaho.
>>> My adopted home state of Virginia is among the few states in the top quintile along with New Hampshire, Tennessee, Texas, Missouri, North and South Dakota, Colorado, Arizona, and Utah.
Yes, apparently I did.
The level of freedom depends on what you are trying to accomplish. Pennsylvania, my state, looks to be in the second quintile. That might be accurate if you go to your job, come home and live your life without trying to do anything out of the ordinary. Try to start a business however, and you will see why PA has been, and continues to be an economic embarrassment.
[...] Mercatus Center study that compares levels of economic and personal liberty among the 50 states. (Doug Mataconis also linked to that post at Below the Beltway, but that wasn’t a blog carnival [...]