This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, June 10th, 2011.

I'm Caleb Brown.

How free is your state?

What factors contribute to freedom at the state level.

And how do states that are relatively more free

differ from those that aren't?

Jason Sorrens is author of freedom in the 50 states,

a report published by the Mercatus Center, we spoke following an event for the report

held yesterday.

A lot is made of a right-to-work laws in a lot of states, and that was a part of your assessment. Is the right to work law the tail wagging

the dog or can you tell? What do you mean by that? That is a right to work law would come about because of other factors that also contribute to good

economic outcomes, high levels of freedom, things like that.

Yeah there's something to that so you're not going to see a state like New York or

California or New Jersey or whatever adopt a right to work law. It's just never going

to happen at least not in the foreseeable future and course, those states also tend to have lots of other

intrusive regulations that hurt their economy.

So I don't think you can look at a right to work law in isolation.

And, you know, we've, I've actually looked at try to try to break out different

components of our freedom index and look at their effects on in migration and really it's the overall index it does the best job,

the overall economic and personal freedom indices.

So you really can't just point to right to work as a silver bullet.

It may contribute.

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