Freedom in the 50 States

While cleaning out my overstuffed bookmarks, I ran across a study I discovered awhile back from the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. The entire PDF report is available here.

Let’s see how the Socialist Shithole created by Doyle Badger State stands up to the other 49 states. Remember this study was done BEFORE the crippling budget passed by Doyle and the Demtards. The purpose of the study and a quick summary is stated as follows.

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; and (3) it uses new, more accurate measurements of key variables, particularly
state fiscal policies

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 data used to create the rankings are publicly available online at
www.statepolicyindex.com, and we invite others to adopt their own
weights to see how the overall state freedom rankings change

You can go over and see the individual charts if you wish but here’s the summary by the authors.

Wisconsin (#35 economic, #39 personal, #37
overall) (Note: That is just pathetic.) could stand to become a little more like
its neighbors to the southwest and northeast
(Iowa and Michigan) and a little less like its neighbors
to the northwest and south (Minnesota and
Illinois). Government spending and taxes are high.
Property and individual income taxes are both high.
Government spending on education and social services
is well above national norms. Alcohol laws are
among the best in the country, with taxes low across
the board. Wisconsin does not authorize sobriety
checkpoints and is one of three states not to require
auto insurance. The state has mandatory approval of
private schools and extensive curriculum oversight.
However, home schools are very lightly regulated.
Labor laws are not very good. Wisconsin has one of
the worst asset forfeiture regimes in the country:
The burden of proof is on the government, but they
only need to prove that the property was used in a
crime. Eminent domain reform has not gone very far.
Smoking bans allow numerous exceptions.

Overall, a dismal performance by Doyle, the Demtards and the electorate who put those clowns into office. Thank you very little.