The George Mason University Mercatus Center released its 2011 Freedom in the 50 States index.

Wisconsin ranks 25th among the 50 states, two positions better than in 2007. Wisconsin ranks 18th in personal freedom and 31st in economic freedom.

In the Midwest, Wisconsin trails Indiana (fourth), Missouri (sixth) and Iowa (13th), but ranks better than Michigan (27th), Minnesota (34th), Illinois (41st) and Ohio (42nd). New Hampshire tops the list, and New York is at the bottom.

The index ranks the states on economic and personal freedom based on the premise that freedom is grounded “on an individual-rights framework. In our view, individuals should be allowed to dispose of their lives, liberties, and properties as they see fit, as long as they do not infringe on the rights of others.”

That, of course, is contrary to the toxic brew that has been politics in this state for basically all of its history. The Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance’s Why Are Wisconsin’s Taxes High? quotes historian Daniel Elazar as putting Wisconsin into the third of three groups of political cultures among the states — “Moralistic,” which considers government “a positive instrument with a responsibility to promote the general welfare.” Elazar put an interesting mix of nine states in that category — Maine, Vermont, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Colorado, Utah and Oregon. That is as opposite as you can get from the “Individualistic” model, found in a belt of states almost exactly south of the Moralistic Belt, that “emphasizes the centrality of private concerns” and places “a premium on limiting community intervention.” When the study was written in 2003, seven of the nine Moralistic states ranked in the top 18 states for tax burden, which shows off Wisconsin’s Socialist roots as well.

The study’s rankings are based on fiscal (government spending and taxation) and regulatory (“labor regulation, health-insurance coverage mandates, occupational licensing, eminent domain, the tort system, land-use regulation, and utilities”) policy, as well as a category called “paternalism” that includes home- and private-school regulations as well as measures of personal freedom. Not only is this the only study (according to the authors) of objective measures of economic and personal freedom among the states,  it also recognizes that economic freedom (mostly favored by Republicans) and personal freedom (sometimes favored by Democrats) are inseparable.

First, the relative good news, in personal freedom:

The state has mandatory interdistrict public-school choice and a voucher program. Regulation of private schools, including general curriculum oversight, is light. Homeschools are also regulated with some annoying notification requirements. Wisconsin has very respectable asset-forfeiture laws (over one standard deviation better than average). Like North Dakota, Wisconsin has very high victimless-crime arrest rates (both as a percentage of the population and as a percentage of all arrests). On the other hand, its drug law-enforcement rate is actually below average. Alcohol laws are among the best in the country, with taxes fairly low across the board. Wisconsin does not authorize sobriety checkpoints and, before the data cutoff, was one of three states not to require auto insurance (it has since passed a law). Cigarette taxes are very high, but smoking bans allow numerous exceptions. Wisconsin enacted a domestic-partnership law after the cutoff date for our data.

Law enforcement and the prohibition lobby have been lobbying for sobriety checkpoints (which are blatant violations of the Fourth and Fifth amendments) and more restrictive drunk driving laws, but legislators have so far resisted them. (Wisconsin’s drunk driving problem is the number of drivers with unbelievably large numbers of drunk driving convictions, not the penalties for first-offense drunk driving or the legal definition of intoxication.) The anti-smoking zealots don’t believe the smoking bans are restrictive enough, while those who believe in economic freedom believe that bar owners should be able to decide for themselves whether or not to allow smoking.

Now, the bad news, in economic freedom:

In terms of economic freedom, the state’s spending and debt are roughly average. However, government spending on transportation and public safety are above national norms. The overall tax burden is quite a bit higher than average, as are individual income and property taxes. Eminent-domain-law reform has stalled and could go a lot further. Wisconsin has deregulated cable service but still needs further deregulation in other areas. The state has a prevailing-wage law, but minimum wage is not above the federal level. Occupational licensing is average and there is no community rating for health insurance (there are rate bands for small-group insurers).

I can certainly believe the part about government spending on public safety, given the presence of the waste of tax dollars that is the Town of Ripon Police Department and the Wisconsin State Patrol. The Mercatus Center helpfully points out Wisconsin’s totals in state and local government spending (23.3 percent), taxes (11 percent) and debt (19.8 percent) as a percentage of personal income to prove that the overall tax burden is “quite a bit higher than average.” (Fourth highest, as you know.)

One and a half of the Mercatus Center’s policy recommendations are already getting legislative attention: “Reduce the income-tax burden while cutting back spending in areas above the national average, like education,” and “Broaden the school-choice/school-voucher reforms.” The third area has gotten little attention, but needs attention: “Reform eminent-domain laws,” to prevent unfairly-compensated government land grabs in the name of development. The half is in taxes, because too many people in this state persist in the delusion that more money automatically means better schools.

I can’t tell if Wisconsin is going in the right direction or not. The Walker administration’s defanging of public employee unions is in the courts, tax cuts haven’t taken effect and aren’t large enough anyway, and we don’t have concealed-carry yet. (Concealed-carry is in fact about freedom. You have heard of the Second Amendment, right?) Going from 27th to 25th is not really progress,  but had the Nov. 2 election results been different, we’d be heading toward 50th instead of the correct direction.