George Rebane
[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 1 October 2015, not 30 September as previously noted.]
For over two centuries America has had the reputation as being exceptional in the freedoms granted its citizens and guaranteed by its constitution. However things have changed over the last 50 years or so, and few Americans are aware of it. Our personal and economic freedoms have taken a dive which has gone unreported by the left-leaning lamestream media, and therefore unknown to those who limit their news to such outlets. You are fortunate that KVMR is not among them.
Recently some thought provoking studies have been published which put the United States into perspective with other developed countries, and the resulting picture is not pretty. But the findings do go a long way to explain the economic and social degradation we experience in the “land of the free and the home of the brave.”
The libertarian Cato Institute recently published its massive and heavily documented ‘Human Freedom Index’ made up of the Personal Freedom and Economic Freedom Indexes. These are based on 76 distinct indicators of personal and economic freedom in areas such as ‘Rule of Law’, ‘Security and Safety’, ‘Movement’, ‘Legal System and Property Rights’, ‘Regulation of Credit, Labor, and Business’, and so on.
Now here comes the part where you want to check your seatbelts. America ranks 20th in the world on the overall Human Freedom Index. There the top five freest countries are Hong Kong, Switzerland, Finland, Denmark, and New Zealand. Almost every country that most of us consider advanced ranks ahead of us. But the sadder part is in the constituent Personal Freedom index; there America ranks 31st. This is not a surprise to those of us with enough birthdays. We have witnessed the slow erosion of our freedoms over the last few decades as the Leviathan continues to lay on the burden of more laws, regulations, and codes.
On the Economic Freedom index we rank 12th. But even that is now a position in flux as our country’s business tax load drives more and more companies to take their operations overseas. To this we add the just released annual International Tax Competitiveness Index by the non-partisan Tax Foundation that ranks the US a “dismal 32nd out of 34 industrialized nations.” The Baltic nation Estonia “again enjoys the top overall ranking in this year’s index.” And things will definitely get worse if progressive policies today promised by the Left are added to those that got us here. With these policies the new normal for our economic growth will be below 2%, and that not only hurts the mostly poor and under-educated, but also makes them more prone than ever to vote to continue this vicious cycle.
What seems to promote our insane public policies most is the government’s synchronized destruction of America’s families along with our public education system. Both liberal and conservative institutions studying the problem agree that “the goal is to encourage work and move people from school or unemployment into the work force, not to channel resources on the basis of need.” In other words naked wealth transfers and redistribution has not worked, and does not work with the incentives it sets up for people to simply get a job, or form traditional two-parent families that support their children’s education. Within our over-regulated social system and perverse tax codes, the penalty for making the right decisions today is just too high, with promises in place to make it higher still. The bottom line is that social and economic opportunities rise and fall together. Family lives also matter, and the attempt to solve social problems while hobbling the economy will only continue our downward spiral as is evident by how we measure our place in the community of nations. (see 'The Inequality Cycle')
Ignoring our performance and taking other people’s money to fix all of our ills got us here, and drinking more of that Kool-Aid will not help. But the real tragedy is that most people have no sense of how much our independence, industry, and initiative has already been depleted by the uncounted number of small cuts made daily by the central planners of Washington and Sacramento.
My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively. However my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR. Thank you for listening.
rebanesruminations.com 
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