Okay. You think you live in a free country. You know the word is tossed about a lot and it certainly is an important word in our nation's foundational documents.But a lot has changed since the American Revolution. Indeed, a lot has changed since the New Deal.
So the question is a legitimate one -- Just how free are you?
Well, before you answer, you might want to take a peek at a new George Mason University study, Freedom in the 50 States: An Index of Personal and Economic Freedom by William P. Ruger & Jason Sorens. It's a 59-page PDF file (which might be a bit longish for most web surfers) but it really is interesting reading. Plus, you can skip right to your state to see how it compares with others.
I print below the opening paragraphs of the report and then the summary material on Nebraska.
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.
This study improves on prior attempts to score economic freedom for American states in three primary ways: (1) it includes measures of social and personal freedoms such as peaceable citizens’ rights to educate their own children, own and carry firearms, and be free from unreasonable search and seizure; (2) it includes far more variables, even on economic policies alone, than prior studies, and there are no missing data on any variable; and (3) it uses new, more accurate measurements of key variables, particularly state fiscal policies.
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.
New York is the least free by a considerable margin, followed by New Jersey, Rhode Island, California, and Maryland. On personal freedom alone, Alaska is the clear winner, while Maryland brings up the rear. As for freedom in the different regions of the country, the Mountain and West North Central regions are the freest overall while the Middle Atlantic lags far behind on both economic and personal freedom. Regression analysis demonstrates that states enjoying more economic and personal freedom tend to attract substantially higher rates of internal net migration...
Nebraska falls a bit behind other Great Plains states (#27 economic, #34 personal, #28 overall).
Government spending is very high, more than a standard deviation above average. The “other spending” category is particularly high; we will not hazard a guess as to what expenditures that category might be picking up.
On the positive side, the state is highly fiscally decentralized, and local budget constraints are relatively “hard.” The firearms regime is actually not very liberal, considering that Nebraska is a fairly rural state. For instance, the state government does not pre-empt local limitations on firearms carry. Local governments also have broad powers to license gun dealers, require background checks for private sales and gun shows, register firearms, license handguns, and so on.
Marijuana laws are relatively liberal, except for the one-year mandatory minimum sentence for low-level cultivation or sale and the 50-year maximum penalty. Nebraska requires state approval and teacher licensure for private schools, but there are broad exemptions. Home schooling laws are liberal overall, but notification requirements are burdensome. Labor laws are very good, and health insurance regulations are on the whole relatively reasonable. Eminent domain has not been sufficiently reformed. The state’s liability system is one of the best in the country. Arrest rates for victimless crimes are extremely high (1.3% of the population, 22% of all arrests). Smoking bans have broad exceptions.
