Texas Has the Fewest Personal Freedoms

Salamendacious@lemmy.world to politics @lemmy.world – 894 points – Texas has the fewest personal freedoms
newsweek.com

Texas was found to be the state with the fewest personal freedoms, according to the Cato Institute's new Freedom Index.

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Never trust anything the Cato Institute says, as a rule. It's almost certainly garbage.

Sure, but when a conservative propaganda machine claims that even Texas is too authoritarian ...

Then they just have an agenda to say those freedoms were taken by Democrats, and that you really need more freedom via deregulation.

First you sell the problem, then you sell your solution.

Even for Republicans that's an incredibly bold move. Democrats have been the minority party in Texas for over a decade.

Perhaps a million migrants from California might change that.

:D

I kind of did the same with The Heritage Foundation.

They have a page cataloging every single instance of voter fraud they could find, and they're up to... 1,474. Total. Since 1982. Regardless of party. In the same span of time, just looking at presidential elections, over 1.1 billion ballots were cast.

This is an abjectly evil "think tank" behind Project 2025, which actively pushes the big voter fraud lie to push mass disenfranchisement, and even they could only find an astronomically small rate of voter fraud.

Came here to say this.

Ironically, Cato Institute is bankrolled by Koch brothers, the architects of modern republican party

Yep. We can look at the source to see what their metrics are. They have economic freedoms and personal freedoms.

The metrics for economic freedoms they used are fiscal and regulatory freedom. Focusing on fiscal, that branches down into: state taxes, local taxes, government spending, government employment, government debt, and "cash & security assets." It's obviously a libertarian based definition of "economic freedom", wherein they feel someone with $5 to their name and no obligations is more economically free than someone with $100 to their name and $10 of taxes. Completely illogical bullshit.

But you can look at it and see that a lot of them are incoherent or intentionally overlapping even if you buy into their base ideology.

Why are government spending and government taxation separate entries? Is someone with low taxes less "economically free" because their government budget is able to afford to be larger anyway? Why does government employment factor in at all? Surely — especially after you've accounted for any budgetary, taxation, and debt based impacts — there's nothing inherent to government employees existing that can be argued to impact someone's "economic freedom." Even within their base libertarian fantasies, the overlap and design of the categories will specifically make a richer, but otherwise completely identical, state less free than a poorer copy-cat.

The rest of their categories are even more bullshit. They have an entire section under personal freedom categorized as "Travel Freedom." A sane person might define that as both the right and the capacity to travel places. They define it as "This category includes seat belt laws, helmet laws, mandatory insurance coverage, and cell phone usage laws." So a state is less "free" according to Cato if it makes it illegal to text while driving.

tl;dr it's all libertarian bullshit.

I agree. I thought it was noteworthy that Cato put Texas last. They are not a neutral news source. But they did put Texas last in personal freedoms.

It's extremely biased, but not garbage. I say this as someone that has watched and read right wing news for years. Heritage Foundation is garbage. Cato is ideologically consistent and actually has good arguments. AEI is also good for extremely biased arguments.