Economic Freedom Rankings - Heritage / Wall Street Journal

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Some liberals may blanche at the agency reporting it (as a conservative free market think tank) but the data goes back to 1995 and it is very interactive and informative and some underlying assumptions can be undermined by this such as the direction certain countries are heading in with regard to say labor freedom, government integrity, and other factors that people even those who openly disdain 'free markets' can get behind from a human rights perspective.

Example you can see that the US got surpassed by Canada in 2009 - likely due to US regulations following the economic crash. Or Canada's labor freedom dropping out of the top category in just the past two years.

I see no evidence though that these ratings correlate in any way to predicting which nations will have stronger future GDP.  Given the measures, I have no doubt that these rankings correlate very strongly with which nations will have growing wealth inequality.

Anytime an organization uses a loaded term like 'freedom' except in that terms' original meaning/context that should tell you that the organization's work is for propaganda purposes and not for governance purposes.

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Some liberals may blanche at the agency reporting it (as a conservative free market think tank) but the data goes back to 1995 and it is very interactive and informative and some underlying assumptions can be undermined by this such as the direction certain countries are heading in with regard to say labor freedom, government integrity, and other factors that people even those who openly disdain 'free markets' can get behind from a human rights perspective.

Example you can see that the US got surpassed by Canada in 2009 - likely due to US regulations following the economic crash. Or Canada's labor freedom dropping out of the top category in just the past two years.

I see no evidence though that these ratings correlate in any way to predicting which nations will have stronger future GDP.  Given the measures, I have no doubt that these rankings correlate very strongly with which nations will have growing wealth inequality.

Anytime an organization uses a loaded term like 'freedom' except in that terms' original meaning/context that should tell you that the organization's work is for propaganda purposes and not for governance purposes.

GDP is a rather inaccurate barometer.

I prefer the Fraser Institute's Human Freedom Index which combines Personal Freedom with Economic Freedom. The one I mentioned was from 2017. Frankly, without ability to have freedom to change jobs, freedom to start a company, etc then one is in a position of depending on the whims of the locality and how its civil rights conditions are. For all the complaints of bias though if you actually look at the rankings you can see that economic freedom can be achieved while maintaining civil liberties and there is a correlation between the two as the Fraser one shows.

If that was all there was to it, that would be fine, but looking at the Heritage Foundation website it includes 'property rights' which generally means 'no regulations on developers', 'tax burden' which generally means 'low taxes on the rich'  and 'labor freedom' which means 'no unions.'

I think it's pretty clear that what these rankings really favor are countries that have policies that lead to increasing economic inequality.  Again, I haven't and I don't know if anybody has done a comparison of nations that receive high rankings from the Heritage Foundation or the Fraser Institute, but I would certainly expect a very high correlation not with increasing median wealth in those countries but with increasing income and economic inequality.

Of course, if your values are that the rich deserve to be rich and that the poor deserve to be poor, then you are perfectly welcome to take these rankings from the Fraser Institute and the Heritage Foundation seriously, but I think we should all understand what these rankings are most likely really measuring.

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Heritage ranking is a bad ranking. The richest countries are the top countries in the countries because the ranking doesn't measure how free are the economies. They measure how developed are the economies.

Not entirely true. For instance Chile is not richer than France for instance. But it is easier (though reportedly worsening under Socialist rule the last couple years) in many respects there for business & personal consumers - look at their methodology first.

Over a long enough period you can see how Venezuela has foundered its natural resource situation and the measures over time are interesting.

They measure based on other global rankings from OECD, World Bank, GDP data, etc - widely shared data.

Example property rights --

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At the end of the day its all in the FAQ on their site and many countries in the top 10 have a considerable social welfare apparatus such as NZ, Canada, and Australia. Swiss power is at the canton level but they are open for business as they say. The US on the other hand seems to be falling particularly on the Fraser Institute's combined rankings.

To me the achievement of improving abject poverty numbers by over 50% since 1980 thanks considerably  to increased economic freedom in the developing world has been amazing.  

That is of course lost in the inequality talk.

Leaving aside that I dispute the term 'economic freedom' the obvious mistake you're making is in claiming "if some 'economic freedom' is good, then more must be better."

The decline in abject poverty is, of course, mainly due to India and China opening up their economies and reducing the power of their bureaucracies and both would probably do well to open up even further, however, there comes a point where 'economic freedom' increases income inequality and leads to economic growth going to the 1% - or more likely 10% or so of the 1%.

This point, as I mentioned above, is when nations start to adopt pro 'economic freedom' policies that are anti union, anti consumer regulations, anti environment and that allow bankers to wildly speculate.