Red State, Blue State. Which is best?
Of course, the answer to that question depends on which side of politics you stand.
Here is a bunch of statistics that won’t be in your Democratic voter pamphlet, but they should be.
Mercatus Center at George Mason University publishes “Freedom in the 50 States.” It was the latest edition, released on Friday, which indicates that “blue states” are the least free. The report profiles its updated state rankings based on how each state’s policies promote freedom in the fiscal, regulatory, and personal areas.
How Democratic is that?
Mercatus Center says their report “examines state and local government intervention across a wide range of policy categories, from tax burden to court systems, from eminent domain laws to occupational licensing, and from home schooling regulations to drug policy.”
The fiscal area includes the tax burden, state government spending and overall debt. The regulatory aspect includes freedom from tort abuse, property rights protection, labor market freedom and cable and telecom freedom. Personal freedom is described as gun control, alcohol, marriage, gambling freedoms, as well as civil liberties, education policy, and campaign finance freedom.
Let’s start with the worst of the worst. The state is suffers more tyranny than any other. Lefties will be thinking … it must be one of those southern red states, because they surely must be the worst of the worst … nothing could be worse than them.
This must be the blockbuster upset of all time, a result made to shatter the illusions of the left who think their freedom comes from smiling democrat politicians.
Wrong!
Out of the 50 states, (or 57 if you believe everything Brack Obama tells you) New York was dead last. Failing in the categories listed above would be bad enough, but it worse. New York was a complete failure with other freedoms, including freedom from nanny laws, seat-belt enforcement, local rent control, motorcycle helmet laws, fireworks laws, trans-fat bans, and tobacco restrictions.
“New York is by far the least free state in the Union. It is therefore no surprise that New York residents have been heading for the exits: 9 percent of the state’s 2000 population, on net, left the state for another state between 2000 and 2011, the highest such figure in the nation. New York has, by a wide margin, the highest taxes in the country: 14.0 percent of income.”
Surely that must be an anomaly. The next ones would have to be red states.
No. More blue states.
Following right behind New York came California, New Jersey, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Illinois, and Maryland. You may remember that all five of these states voted to re-elect President Obama in 2012.
Let’s look at the other end of the scale.
The freest state in the union is … North Dakota. Explaining their findings, the Mercatus analysis said, “The state scores exceptionally well on regulatory and fiscal policy. Moreover, North Dakota scores slightly above average on personal freedom. It is also the state that improved the most over the last decade,” and, they said, North Dakota “has very low taxes and government debt.”
North Dakota was followed by the freedom-loving states of South Dakota, Tennessee, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Idaho, and Missouri.
All but New Hampshire voted for Republican Mitt Romney at the last presidential election.
These results are no surprise to conservatives. Liberals must really like tyranny, because they voted for the tyrannical Barack Obama. Unfortunately, they don’t like to keep oppression to themselves, they like to spread it to everyone else as well. They voted away their freedoms, handing them over to smiling politicians who told them what they wanted to hear.
