On Tuesday of last week, the Cato Institute released
the latest edition of “Freedom in the 50 States,” which ranks states by how
their public policies champion freedom: fiscally, with regulations, and in ways
affecting personal freedom. The process used in reaching their conclusions was
described as: “To determine the rankings, state and local government
intervention was examined across a range of more than 230 policy variables —
from taxation to debt, eminent domain laws to occupational licensing, and drug
policy to educational choice.”
Now, according to Cato the ten best states ranked
for freedom were Florida (R), New Hampshire (R), Indiana (R), Colorado (D),
Nevada (R), North Dakota ( R), Tennessee (R), South Dakota (R), Arizona (R),
and Kansas (R). Now I’m not sure why Colorado
was in the freedom column, it’s one of the worst states for religious rights
and firearm ownership and that’s just off the top of my head. One would think that those two things should
be automatic disqualifiers, I certainly do!
But perhaps other categories were sufficient enough to outweigh those.
Meanwhile, the worst ten states were New Mexico (R),
Rhode Island (D), Delaware (D), Oregon (D), Maryland (R), Vermont, New Jersey (D),
California (D), Hawaii (D), and New York (D). Now for those of us more interested in freedom
than we are in ‘free’ stuff, this information can be, and should be, rather useful
as we head into November’s election. Because
I think it’s worth pointing out that the one common denominator among most of
those states rated as being LESS free, and sometimes very much less, is that
there is a Democrat as governor.
The CATO Institute has ranked the Empire State 50th
since the year 2000. Florida has ranked first every year for the last three
years. And on a personal note, I was born and raised in New York and lived
there up until the time I joined the Navy.
After serving for 24 years I retired to Florida deciding that New York
had become even worse than it was at the time I had left. But if there is anything that this
information does show us it’s that there is a direct correlation between those in
the Democrat Party and people experiencing an obvious lack of freedom.
