According to the 2012 Index of Economic Freedom, a joint publication of The Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal, global economic freedom has declined over the past year. But what does this mean for America and the world?
Economic freedom empowers ordinary people with greater opportunity and individual choice, and it lets people decide for themselves how best to achieve their highest aspirations. From the amount a government spends, to the individual property rights extended to its citizens, a nation’s economic freedom is closely tied to key values like the elimination of poverty and freedom from corruption.
To learn more about economic freedom and view the 2012 Index country rankings, visit us online at heritage.org/Index
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The Heritage Foundation provides a great resource for looking at the worlds economic activity and liberty.
we need more of these videos, excellent!!
@italianstallion30 Ron Paul is the complete joke. You fail to factor in the cost of NOT acting in Iraq & Afghanistan. Free (or relatively free) markets look forward, and require relative certainty for growth. The primary role of our government is to secure & protect the citizenry, who bestow upon government this responsibility. As for the ruin of America,the ill policies of the federal reserve, pale in comparison to the Obama agenda of institutionalized liberalism.
While I agree with the noble goal of charting economic freedom in each nation, I think the Heritage Foundation is partisan in its assessment. The US was economically unfree throughout the Bush years, and that brought on the housing bubble and subsequent market crash in 2007/8. Obama exacerbated it with more of the same. But please don't act like Republicans and "conservatives" don't also share in the responsibility for our troubles.
keynsian voodoo economics claiming that gov spending helps the economy…
whiel velocity is important, gov spending is money taken away from people (who would spend it, invest it, put it in banks to be loaned out, or put out of circulation to lower prices – all self-stabilizing forces), and spends it. when gov spends it, u take people's money, and give it back to them, but the net difference is that the people had to work to stay even. if that's helping the economy, give slave owners medals.
@SpykerSpeed The Wall Street Journal is a media outlet which tends to favor the Big Government Republican establishment… Considering that they fund much of the Heritage Foundation, I think it is healthy to maintain a level of skepticism. Can anyone from the Heritage Foundation cite data points for the freedom of a business to fail? No matter how large the institution, in a truly efficient free market environment, a business must be allowed to fail and smaller ones to rise up in its wake.
The irony is that the US government was forced to intervene and spend money on a bail out because of market failure.
Great Depression was caused by government intervention in the first place. You want another one? Go ahead and ask for more government spending.
Oh, really?
The Great Depression was literally caused by bad bank policies, collapse of a free-wheeling speculation system, and the economic fallout of the Dust Bowl.
By the way, that third one is likely to happen again if current climate trends continue.
You should research a little more about Hong Kong, for instance. It is a country with 1,104km² and 6,864,000 people living there, which means 6,294.65 people per Km². That's a lot more than USA, Japan and many others. Even though, its non-interventionism guarantees a great HDI, great Per Capita Income etc.
US public debt has already surpassed its GDP, the graph in the middle is wrong.
No, it means the rule of law: protection of life, liberty, and property. And that does not include slave trade, sorry. 🙂
And may I say that the three most reknown founders of this system are Vanderbilt, Rockefeller and Carnegie. And we know how good they were for the workers they build their fortune on. Quite logic that their concience started to rise up as they grew older.
Not that kind collectivist of rule of law where you use laws to rule over people with them. We are talking about the rule of law based on individual self ownership and private property rights.
What a load of bullshit!
The factors of production don't belong in the hands of the aristocracy. We cannot entrust the wealth of our society in the hands of capitalists who do not give back to the society from which they profit.
Hello, Koch ^brother. Fuck you.