NEW YORK - The state of our Union is mostly free.
This may shock citizens who call America the "Land of the Free." Alas, as the Heritage Foundation demonstrates, Washington has transformed Francis Scott Key's timeless truths into mere lyrics.
In conjunction with the Wall Street Journal, Heritage's 16th annual Index of Economic Freedom ranks 179 of Earth's nations on 10 factors including fiscal discipline, free trade, labor freedom, and corruption. By these measures, America is not No. 1. If economic freedom were an event at Vancouver's Winter Olympics, America would not earn even a bronze medal. In fact, the U.S. fell from No. 6 last year, to No. 8 today. No. 1 Hong Kong leads Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and Switzerland. Even Canada is economically freer than America.
Even worse, for the first time, the Index rates America "mostly free." From a perfect "Freedom Score" of 100, the U.S. slid from 80.7 points in 2008 to 78 in 2009, thus dropping from the "free" category to "mostly free." Denmark and Chile complete the top 10. So, at least, America is freer than they are.
America's 2.7 percentage point decline was among the steepest. Only 11 countries deteriorated more rapidly. These include such Marxian paradises as Bolivia, Ecuador, Libya, and Venezuela. Not even Cuba, Zimbabwe, nor North Korea (rated Nos. 177 to 179) slipped as much, although they already approach the bottom.
So what went wrong?
Authors Kim Holmes, Ph.D.; Anthony Kim, and Ambassador Terry Miller explain that for America "Economic freedom has declined in seven of the 10 categories measured in the index." These include "notable decreases in financial freedom, monetary freedom, and property rights." Specifically:
-- "Uncertainties caused by ongoing regulatory changes and politically influenced stimulus spending have discouraged entrepreneurship and job creation, slowing recovery. Leadership in free trade has been undercut by 'Buy American' provisions in stimulus legislation and failure to pursue previously agreed free trade agreements with Panama, Colombia, and South Korea. Tax rates are increasingly uncompetitive and massive stimulus spending is creating unprecedented deficits."
-- Last year "government spending equaled 37.4 percent of GDP. Spending increases totaled well over $1 trillion in 2009 alone, an increase of more than 20 percent over 2008."
-- "Government interventions in financial markets and the automotive sector have raised concerns about expropriation and violation of the contractual rights of shareholders and bondholders."
The president's three-year freeze in domestic discretionary spending (but not until 2011) is a welcome tap of the brakes after the fiscal joyride of the Bush-Rove-Obama years. Still, Obama must do much more to regain the confidence of America's business community. Bloomberg News recently surveyed 873 of its subscribers and found that 77 percent of its U.S. customers consider Obama anti-business. Only 27 percent judged Obama favorably. "Investors no longer feel they can trust their instincts to take risks," New York broker David Young told Bloomberg.
Former Microsoft COO Robert J. Herbold and Hoover Institution fellow Scott S. Powell also argue that America has strayed from capitalism. In a New York Post piece, they identified Accenture, Covidien, Ingersoll-Rand, and Tyco International among 11 major companies that "have all completed or taken steps to change their domicile of incorporation -- with Switzerland and Ireland as the most popular relocation destinations." These and other companies have been chased offshore by America's 39.1 percent combined federal and state corporate tax (the developed world's second worst, after Japan's 39.5 percent levy), a grim parade of brain-dead legislative measures, and mind-numbing new regulations from Washington's hundreds of agencies, boards, and commissions.
Manhattan financier Brett A. Shisler calculates that these 11 companies reported $97.2 billion in sales in 2008. What a pot of gold for Washington to jettison. Of course, this trend only will accelerate as U.S. corporate revenues, jobs, and hope become exports. So long as America leads the "mostly free" world, money will go where it is treated more politely -- beyond the "Home of the Brave."
(Deroy Murdock is a columnist with Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University. E-mail him at deroy.Murdock(at)gmail.com)
COLUMN
freedom
Mostly free is only temporary; I have no doubt that by next year we will be wondering how we could lose so much in one year.
a poem:
Congress in acts near to treason
have turned the Communist way
It's time to enact term limits
a al Timothy McVeigh.
RCR
Conservatives in acts of treason
Conservatives in acts of treason
Have cut taxes without reason
And now America must bow and borrow
From Chinese masters, everlasting sorrow
capitalism
This articled is a bit naive. We have tried the approach he describes and it has not worked. We need a new model of capitalism. Pres. Bush abrogated many laws in order to assist capitalism, and it ended up with a huge deficit, when he came in with money in the government coffers. It is time to put aside ideology because we cannot afford to go on the way we have been. Capitalism does not mean only corporate capitalism, nor does it mean only American or British-style capitalism. Americans really need to be better informed. there is European-style capitalism, and Chinese capitalism, and Islamic caapitalism.
We need to debate NEW ways of approaching our economic and financial model, and corporatism has led to a lot of corruption and waste, which is not the conservative way.
Slaves to our tools of measurement
Economics freedom is a good thing, I suppose, unless one if free to only obey a meager set of options.
Some things to consider:
Maybe someone oughta looks at the US prison rate:
- what is economic freedom if you're behind bars?
- what's with the states that spend more on prisons that education?
- is it within reason that the US sends more people behind bars for drug related crimes than the entire Western Europe do for ALL crimes. That region, btw., happens to have 100 million more people in it than the US.
- consider the economic devastation from waging such a drug war when there are NO measurable positve effects, and all experts agree this approach is actually what "destroys neighborhoods". Even law enforcements says this (e.g. http://leap.cc/ )
- maybe calculate the payoff from all wars (against drug, Iraq, Iran) a bit more, well, as economists would do.
In my view it's interesting that the Danish economy, while not-so-free by these measurements, is ten times healthier than the best the "free world" can believer.
Furthermore I sleep well knowing that should I get sick or my company have to fire me I won't plummet to my economic death. Everybody knows that here and we call it "flex security": we get a flexible labor market where companies can adapt to changes quickly without turmoil or trouble to employees, because they know we'll take care of each other.
Of course it's not a perfect system, but nor does it suck.
I don't like subsidies like the ones given to the car industry. It's destructive in the long run and makes an industry weak and complacent.
Basically it's a question of proper leadership, not so much ideology. But whenever politicians make it a habit to rely on faith and even abhor evidence. Well, go figure.
It's amazing such an amazing people have managed to get such terrible laws and leadership for so long. The people deserve to be able to spend their freedom serving who they want and just not the military and prison industrial complex.
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