Saw this today about a study on states that are doing well, growing in business and personal freedom, verses blue states like California, New York, Massachusetts, etc that are less successful.
"Lights Of Liberty"
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysi ... iberty.htm
Excerpt:
Quote:
Freer Pastures: A scholarly study confirms what we already know — Americans want to live where they're free and able to maximize their efforts and talents at work. There's a lesson here for state lawmakers.
The Mercatus Center at George Mason University has for three years compiled "An Index of Personal and Economic Freedom" that "comprehensively ranks the American states on their public policies that affect individual freedoms in the economic, social and personal spheres."
The rankings are based on fiscal policy, regulations and personal freedoms. Gun control, the latitude to home school, alcohol and tobacco laws, and asset forfeiture rules are among the standards used to determine personal freedom.
Based on these criteria, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Indiana, Idaho and Missouri are the freest states, while New York is the least free "by a considerable margin," followed from the bottom up by New Jersey, California, Massachusetts and Hawaii.
The researchers say there's no wide gap separating states that have a libertarian disposition from those that are statist in nature. It seems that while differences exist, the extremes aren't as far apart as might be perceived. The study found that the "variance in liberty at the state level" in our country "is quite small in the global context."
But this narrow variance hasn't stopped a demographic shift. One "of the most intriguing findings of our statistical analysis," the authors say, is "that Americans are voting with their feet and moving to states with more economic and personal freedom."
This finding is consistent with what we've documented before on these pages:
Due to their anti-freedom policies, New York, California and New Jersey are losing their best people in large numbers as well as the wealth and talent that belongs to those who are fleeing.
09 Jun 2011, 8:25 am
