Thirty-Thousand.org

[JEQuidam]

My brother sent this report to me:

Freedom in the 50 states: An index of personal and economic freedom (February 2009)
by William P. Ruger & Jason Sorens
Description and link to the PDF report is provided on this page.

From the report's summary:
"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."

Cut to the money shot, see the four charts on pages 9 and 10:
Table I: Fiscal Policy Ranking
Table II: Regulatory Policy Ranking
Table III: Economic Freedom Ranking
Table IV: Personal Freedom Ranking

And the consolidated "Overall Freedom Ranking" is provided on page 17. BTW, the authors also thoughtfully provide the supporting data (in a separate spreadsheet) to enable anyone to re-analyze the data with their own preferred weightings. Of course, there would be a million ways to measure and weight all the variables ― and inert scholars could forever debate these various ways in their march towards inconsequentness ― but these guys took the initiative and drew a line in the sand for the sake of attempting to benchmark that which I thought was not measurable. (I am impressed.)

Here is the interesting thing: note New Hampshire's preeminent ranking in these tables, and contrast with California's dismal results. Can anyone tell me how this relates to need for representational enlargement? Anyone? As Michael Warnken would hasten to point out, huge California has only 80 legislators in the lower house of its state legislature, while little New Hampshire has 400!

[JEQuidam]

This is a follow-up to the posting about the freedom indices.

In addition to Mercatus, two other think tanks have ranked the states according to their relative levels of freedom.

I have analyzed the results of those analyses. Not surprisingly, those states with the lowest level of freedom have electoral districts (relative to their state legislatures) much larger than those states with the highest level of freedom.

Here is the report: “State Freedom Indices and Legislative District Population Sizes”

(The charts tell the whole story.)

[JEQuidam]

A short article about this report is available here:
http://thirty-thousand-org.blogspot.com ... sizes.html
It's easier to read than the full report.