The Blue and Gray comes from the colors of the uniforms worn by the union army (blue) and the confederate army (gray) during the war between the states. The confederate states were all in the southeast quadrant of the US, and the union states were the northern states and Oregon and California. The confederate states had less freedom for its inhabitants which included slaves. That was then.
Now, William P. Ruger and Jason Sorens have published a paper, Freedom in the 50 States. This document just about flips the map on the states with less freedom(gray) and states with more freedom(blue). The following is a summary of their findings.
We develop and justify our ratings and aggregation procedure on explicitly normative criteria, defining individual freedom as the ability to dispose of one’s own life, liberty, and justly acquired property however one sees fit, so long as one does not coercively infringe on another individual’s ability to do the same. This study improves on prior attempts to score economic freedom for American states in three primary ways: (1) it includes measures of social and personal freedoms such as peaceable citizens’ rights to educate their own children, own and carry firearms, and be free from unreasonable search and seizure.
We find that the freest states in the country are New Hampshire, Colorado, and South Dakota, which together achieve a virtual tie for first place. All three states feature low taxes and government spending and middling levels of regulation and paternalism. New York is the least free by a considerable margin, followed by New Jersey, Rhode Island, California, and Maryland. On personal freedom alone, Alaska is the clear winner, while Maryland brings up the rear. As for freedom in the different regions of the country, the Mountain and West North Central regions are the freest overall while the Middle Atlantic lags far behind on both economic and personal freedom. Regression analysis demonstrates that states enjoying more economic and personal freedom tend to attract substantially higher rates of internal net migration.
The authors of this study have put the data online, and one is able to adopt their own weights to see how the overall freedom rankings change. LINK
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