This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, August 21st, 2018. I'm Caleb Brown.

How free is your state in the Cato Institute's new freedom in the 50 states report authors

Jason Sorrens and Will Ruger go through volumes of data to arrive at a ranking of the

50 states so how did your state do I I spoke with the report's authors today. In this

freedom in the 50 states report what is it exactly that we're measuring?

Well this is the most comprehensive study and ranking of freedom in the 50 states and what we're trying to measure is the ability of people to order their life, liberty, and property as they see fit consistent with the equal rights of others.

And to do that that we compare states on

policies in three different areas, fiscal policy, regulatory policy, and personal

freedom. And we look at about 230 variables in those categories, everything from taxation to debt,

eminent domain laws to occupational licensing, alcohol and drug policy, to educational choice, and so many others.

All right, so which states have performed the best in this sort of snapshot that you've taken?

Well the top state this year is Florida and this is their first time

at number one and then that's followed by New Hampshire, Indiana, Colorado and Nevada.

And then in terms of the states that are actually doing quite poorly in terms of freedom

and again this needs to be looked at relative to other states I mean we're not

saying that these states that are doing poorly are exactly equal to you know Burma or you know

states like Afghanistan or Iraq we're talking about within the context of the

U.S but they are doing quite poorly, particularly number 50, which is New York, which is a lot worse on freedom across the board than other states.

That's followed by Hawaii, California, New Jersey, and Vermont

in terms of the least free in the United States. When we look at states and

the sort of the three broad categories you look at, personal freedom, economic freedom,

regulatory freedom. If you sort of scrub through the book, you notice that, or I noticed, and maybe I'm wrong in thinking this way, but

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