Enjoy Every Sandwich

I don’t recall what I stumbled across this week, but something I read referenced the Sorens and Ruger publication entitled Freedom in the 50 States: An Index of Personal and Economic Freedom which was published by the Mercatus Center earlier this year.

I am kind of aggravated by this study which, in my mind, has a glaring and quickly identifiable fatal flaw. I noticed it almost immediately upon browsing the introductory material in this report shortly after it was published. I initially just let it go, but it is once again causing me mental discord so I’m writing it up. According to the Mercatus Center:

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 another individual’s ability to do the same.

Using that definition of individual freedom, one cannot rank states based solely on state public policies and expect me to take the following conclusion seriously:

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.

For a good counterpoint to this claim that the three states are virtually tied for the title of Most Free State, I refer to the American Civil Liberties Union which in October 2008 published the following map. This map illustrates the 100-mile “Constitution-Free” zone in which the United States Border Patrol has essentially been given legal carte blanche to conduct operations without regard for the so-called highest law of the land:

Note that the entire state of New Hampshire falls within this “Constitution-Free” zone whereas the entire state of Colorado and the entire state of South Dakota fall outside this zone. And the implications for individual freedom depending on whether you live inside or outside this zone are rather weighty. This is just one example of how Federal policy is clearly not equal, let alone equally applied, across all states, and cannot be neglected in a comprehensive state-vs-state evaluation individual freedom.

It certainly was a major factor in my decision to move from my former home in southern Arizona 45 miles north of the Mexican border to my current location in southern Montana. I am confused as to how this could have been so thoroughly blown off in this study. I would think that most people are more concerned with their overall experience of individual freedom rather than specifically with the portion of their oppression that they will endure via their state’s public policy.