Russ Steele
California is in the bottom three with New York and New Jersey when it come to personal and economic freedom according to the latest analysis by Mercatus Center at George Mason University
Executive Summary
This study comprehensively ranks the American states on their public policies that affect individual freedoms in the economic, social, and personal spheres. It updates, expands, and improves upon our inaugural 2009 Freedom in the 50 States study. For this new edition, we have added more policy variables (such as bans on trans fats and the audio recording of police, Massachusetts’s individual health-insurance mandate, and mandated family leave), improved existing measures (such as those for fiscal policies, workers’ compensation regulations, and asset-forfeiture rules), and developed specific policy prescriptions for each of the 50 states based on our data and a survey of state policy experts. With a consistent time series, we are also able to discover for the first time which states have improved and worsened in regard to freedom recently.
Full PDF is here.
Exit Question: How do we get out of the basement and back into the top ten? The Mercatus Center has some analysis and suggestions in these extracts of the PDF.
Exit Question #2: Are Californian's capable of implementing any of these policy recommendations?
