Nov
16
2022

We're Number… Oh, Dammit, Two

[Economic Freedom of North America 2022]

The above map is from Economic Freedom of North America 2022. You'll note that the Granite State is a lonely isle of blue amidst the more statist remainder of New England. Most of the Northeast in fact. You'd have to go all the way down to Virginia to find another state in the top quartile.

However:

In the United States, the most economically free state was Florida at 7.94, followed by New Hampshire at 7.84, South Dakota at 7.75, and Texas and Tennessee at 7.66. (Note that since the indexes were calculated separately for each country, the numeric scores on the subnational indices are not directly comparable across countries.) The least-free state was again New York at 4.25, following California at 4.59, Hawaii at 4.65, Vermont at 4.70, and Oregon at 4.92. For the first time, we have made a preliminary attempt to include the US territory of Puerto Rico in the US subnational index. It came in with a score of 2.04. The next lowest score was more than twice as high.

Note this data covered 2020, the Year of Covid. Arguably, we were a little less free than Florida that year.

Briefly noted:

  • Eric Boehm thinks The Space Force Is an Expensive Farce. Hey, maybe! He's sharp-eyed enough to note:

    The last successful cavalry charge in military history took place in Poland on March 1, 1945—more than a decade before the first man-made object would exit Earth's atmosphere. So it might come as a surprise to learn that the U.S. Space Force—the sixth and newest branch of the military, created by President Donald Trump in 2019—has a stable of decidedly earthbound "military working horses" at the Vandenberg Space Force Base on California's Pacific Coast.

  • This is a pretty good brief article from David Bernstein on the tawdry, politics-driven origins of Your Federal Government's odious policy of racial pigeonholing: The Sordid Business of Divvying Us Up. If you're not mad/disgusted about that now, you will be after reading Bernstein.

  • That visualization Prof Carroll tweeted was from (sigh) Scientific American, Prof Carroll should have known better than to cite them on anything that has a political or ideological component. Hot Air's David Strom has (yet another) example of Bad "science" in Scientific American.

    The author claims to have discovered "stochastic terrorism": the ability of right-wing/conservative pundits to motivate random acts of violence. Strom has plenty of examples of it working the other direction too.


Last Modified 2024-01-30 7:16 AM EDT