Freedom. Liberty. “Free at last!” Just words, or the essence of humanity? We hold this truth to be self-evident; freedom is a fundamental piece of being. We strive for it, we nurture it, we yearn for it, we die in quest of it, and we ache to our bones when it is denied. No chronology or treatise could ever hope to discuss all aspects of liberty. The force of freedom, whatever exactly it is, is too powerful for simple recitation. Here we do not hope to expand the domain of thoughts about freedom. Our goal here is more direct: to measure economic freedom and study how people react to it.

About five years ago several scholars at Clemson University decided to investigate the link, if any, between economic freedom and economic activity in the United States. There was a tried-and-true technique of creating indexes of freedom across countries and across time, but the effort then was the first attempt to examine the impact of economic freedom on life inside the United States.

Our purpose here is to update and refine the original 1999 Clemson University study on economic freedom. We undertake the analysis with up-to-date data, and we add several new measures of economic freedom across the states. As in the earlier study, our method attempts to remove a level of subjectivity common in most discussions of freedom, namely, what exactly is freedom?

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State by State Summaries