Remember, this index was put together by the Cato Institute, a very libertarian organization. According to the American Heritage Dictionary:
- One who advocates maximizing individual rights and minimizing the role of the state.
- One who believes in free will.
- One who maintains the doctrine of the freedom of the will (especially in an extreme form): opposed to necessitarian.
Looking at the index numbers that are given, I would say that this organization believes in the free will of the corporations and everybody else can just suck it. Take a look at where your state ranks in the individual freedoms list, and comment on what you think they actually believe.
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We’re (Utah) right in the middle on average, which I think is pretty accurate. Some notes:
- doesn’t seem to be anything about renter rights, our state is pretty awful with protecting landlords over tenants
- cable and telecom freedom - yeah, no; we had our state overturn my city’s municipal internet and we had to sell the network at a loss; that has apparently changed, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a ton of other nonsense in the legal code
- gambling, tobacco, and alcohol - we scored dead last here, and I’m surprised we’re the worst at alcohol (I knew we were bad, but we’ve had some solid reforms since)
- cannabis - not sure how we score so moderate here; we allow medical marijuana, but our legislature nerfed a “grow your own” ballot initiative, and I don’t think you can get THC here (I don’t use marijuana, so I’m not super educated on this point)
- marriage freedom - we only have marriage freedom because of a district court decision, so I feel like we should be lower
- government debt - not sure why we are only 15, we should be much higher since I’m pretty sure our legislature is required by law to pass a balanced budget, so we really don’t have much debt (this site says we have ~10% debt to GDP)
- government employment - not sure how this is related to their freedom index, but we’re somehow lower than California, which is surprising; I find our gov’t services to work pretty efficiently, so I don’t think we’re hurting for gov’t employees at all
- state/government taxation - I feel like we should score better here; our state income tax is <5% (can only be used for education), sales tax is ~8% (kinda high), and property taxes are generally pretty low (I pay like $2k on a ~$500k property). I wish we’d eliminate our sales tax on food (3%), increase property taxes, and reduce sales tax, but in general, our taxes are pretty reasonable
I don’t understand most of the rest, but I feel like the number my state ended up with is reasonably accurate, though I’d probably remove several of the categories since I don’t really see how they’re related to freedom.
