Nor did I have room to highlight the Cato Institute’s 2021 Freedom in the 50 States report. The study found that, from 1990 to 2019, 44 percent more businesses left California than moved there from other states, resulting in a net loss of nearly 20,000 businesses.īecause there are so many studies and surveys illustrating California’s poor record when it comes to interventionism and restrictions on freedom, I did not have space to mention the recent Hoover Institution working paper which noted that 352 companies had relocated their headquarters out of the state from 2018 through 2021, including Fortune 500 companies McKesson, Tesla, Oracle, Hewlett Packard and Charles Schwab (all of whom moved to Texas, incidentally). It is no wonder, then, that “California has been a net exporter of businesses for at least three decades,” according to Claremont McKenna College’s Kosmont-Rose Institute 2022 Cost of Doing Business Survey. The state ranked 48th in the Tax Foundation’s 2023 State Business Tax Climate Index, has been dubbed one of the nation’s biggest “ Judicial Hellholes” by the American Tort Reform Foundation for encouraging frivolous and abusive lawsuits, received a grade of “F” in Thumbtack’s most recent Small Business Friendliness Survey and placed dead last-again-in Chief Executive Magazine’s annual Best and Worst States for Business survey of CEOs across the country (Texas, Florida and Tennessee dominate the top of the rankings-stop me if this sounds familiar). Numerous surveys and reports analyzing a variety of economic indicators have consistently placed California at or near the very bottom of all states in terms of economic freedom and business climate. These findings are hardly news for California. Following a similar pattern to many other analyses (and interstate migration patterns), California ranked 49th, ahead of only New York. Florida ranked the most economically free state, followed by New Hampshire, South Dakota, Texas, and Tennessee. The Economic Freedom of North America report, as the title suggests, is more narrowly focused on economic freedom but allows us to drill down to the state level. “The policy responses to the coronavirus pandemic, including massive increases in government spending monetary expansion travel restrictions regulatory mandates on businesses related to masks, hours and capacity and outright lockdowns undoubtedly contributed to an erosion of economic freedom for most people,” the report found. The Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of North America and Economic Freedom of the World reports similarly revealed that government COVID-19 policies had led to a significant decline in freedom, as I noted in a recent column for The Hill. “The key question in future years is whether governments will fully reverse COVID-19 related restrictions on freedom as the pandemic moderates or whether some will continue to exert the additional control and spending power they have appropriated to themselves during the pandemic.” “There can be no doubt that the coronavirus pandemic was calamitous for overall human freedom,” the report asserted. The significant decline is attributed to government policies enacted in response to the coronavirus pandemic. The “precipitous descent in 2020 affected every region of the world, including rich and poor countries and democracies and nondemocracies, setting global freedom to a level far below what it was in 2000, previously the lowest point in the past two decades,” it continued. Based on that coverage, 94.3 percent of the world’s population lives in jurisdictions that saw a fall in human freedom from 2019 to 2020,” the report concluded. “Most areas of freedom fell, including significant declines in the rule of law and freedom of movement, expression, association and assembly, and freedom to trade. The news is not good, revealing a broad decline in freedom worldwide in 2020. The Cato Institute recently released its 2022 Human Freedom Index. Single Issues of The Independent Review.Podcast: Independent Outlook / Conversations.International Economics and Development.
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