Not As Free As We Need to Be

The Heritage Foundation and Wall Street Journal released their Index of Economic Freedom on Friday and the news is (shocker!) not good. The United States is now listed as only the 10th freest country, having fallen several places in just the last few years.

Our rating on the index's Freedom from Corruption scale has dropped as well as government has expanded. But we're not the only one regressing. Many of the freer countries in Asia and Europe have fallen as well.

The importance of economic freedom cannot be overstated. As Heritage's Edwin Feulner explains,

Positive measures of human development in areas such as health and education are highly correlated with high levels of economic freedom, and economically free countries do a much better job of protecting the environment than their more regulated competitors. When you actually look at the performance data, it turns out that the "progressive" outcomes so highly touted by those favoring big government programs to address every societal ill are actually achieved more efficiently and dependably by the marketplace and the invisible hand of free economies.

Increased prosperity allows a society to have the resources, including wealth and time, to address non-economic issues. A society that struggles to provide food for all its people will not have the resources to worry about protecting the environment, for instance. If it's a choice between eating and saving a tree, the survival instinct takes over.

Increasing economic freedom increases prosperity, which allows us the luxury to concern ourselves with other issues. But increasing prosperity is not a given. We can restrain ourselves to our detriment, where we become less prosperous over time, rather than more. Unfortunately, we have been moving in the wrong direction, as this study shows.