Freedom and Failure

New Hampshire really does live free. Texas and Colorado still retain the wide-open freedoms of the old west.

Steve Malanga reports in City Journal on the results of a freedom survey conducted by the Mercatus Center of George Mason University. New York came in dead last, and Malanga's piece is an interesting study of this failure.

A new study by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, Freedom in the 50 States, is the most comprehensive effort to date to rank the states on how their public policies influence “individual freedom in the economic, social and personal spheres.” It includes dozens of variables, from social and personal freedoms (such as parents’ right to educate their own children) to regulatory freedom (such as the degree of occupational licensing requirements) to fiscal liberty (as measured, for instance, by states’ debt burdens, which represent a constraint on future generations).

Top 10 (Most Free) States - #1 to #10:
New Hampshire, Colorado, South Dakota, Idaho, Texas, Missouri, Tennessee, Arizona, Virginia, North Dakota

Bottom 10 (Least Free) States #41 to #50:
Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, Washington, Hawaii, Maryland, California, Rhode Island, New Jersey, New York

Data like this is good for poking a finger in the eye of liberalism, but that's not the main point. Studies like this show that conservatism works when it abandons its paternalism, and rampant liberalism is never the path to success.

Merctus.org - Freedom Study
CJ - Malanga
CJ - Gelinas

All That Glitters is not Gold

The woes of New York, Michigan and California are familiar to us now. New York has regulated and taxed itself into oblivion, Michigan's workers have priced themselves out of the global market, and California's progressive wizards have turned its gold into lead.

Only California liberalism could produce a situation where there is a surplus of empty houses while people live in tent cities. But there's trouble in the sun belt as well. Nicole Gelinas writes in the City Journal:

But during the boom times, elected officials in Arizona, Florida, and Nevada took a page out of the old states’ playbook, driving up spending at an unsustainable pace. Now that the growth of the low-tax states has hit a wall, shattering revenues, they face a tough choice: they can raise taxes to fund permanently higher costs, or they can aggressively cut spending.

This is happening in other sunbelt states as well. They are not in as deep as Michigan and California, so these states still control their own destiny, but the author is not optimistic.

But the low-tax, low-services culture is up against a potent force: the inexorable mathematics of budgets that take on a life of their own once they’ve passed the point of no return. If the way that Arizona, Florida, and Nevada are confronting the current crisis is any guide, these states will continue to grow—but they will also grow a little bit more like us.

Can we learn from the failed liberal experiments of Michigan, California and New York? Or are we doomed to replicate them in Arizona, Colorado, and Nevada?

Merctus.org - Freedom Study
CJ - Malanga
CJ - Gelinas