Freedom’s Just Another Word …

By fitsnews • on March 3, 2009

They really do “Live Free or Die” up in New Hampshire, at least according to a recently-conducted examination of freedom in these here United States of America.

According to the survey’s “Overall Freedom Ranking,” New Hampshire, Colorado and South Dakota are the freest states in the land, while New York scored the lowest marks for freedom.

So how does one measure something so seemingly abstract?

Well, according to the report:

We rank all fifty states on overall respect for individual freedom and on components of freedom: “Fiscal Policy,” “Regulatory Policy,” and “Paternalism.” Our approach in this report is to weight policies according to the number of people affected by the policy,the intensity of preferences on the issue, and the importance of state policy variation. However, we happily concede that different people value aspects of freedom differently. Hence, we provide the raw data and weightings on our website so that interested readers can construct their own personal freedom rankings …

Hmmm …

We’d like to think we fall in the category of “interested readers,” but then again we’re not going to construct our own personal freedom rankings, either.

So does that mean we’re really not interested?

And if we’re really not interested, should we play like we’re interested but we’re not all that interested but we think the report might be getting interested but do we want to be interested but now the report’s not interested anymore? So all of the sudden we’re getting, we’re starting to get interested …

Sorry … Crashers flashback.

What we can tell those of you who are interested is that South Carolina ranked 30th among the 50 states in the report.

Which according to our public education means that we’re less free than most but freer than others.

We think.

Sadly, South Carolina is among the least free Southern States, as Tennessee (#7), Virginia (#9), Georgia (#17), Alabama (#21), Florida (#22), North Carolina (#23) and even inbred Mississippi ( #25) all outrank us.

Yeah, Mississippi. You heard us right.