-By Warner Todd Huston
The USA has fallen another few notches on the freedom scale thanks in part to the increasing lawlessness of Obama and his Democrat cohorts according to the latest freedom list put out by the Cato Institute.
Over the last half dozen years or so the USA has slowly lost ground on the Cato Human Freedom Index. This country was once in the top 5 countries with the most freedom but this year the USA slipped several more places to the 20th spot.
Only last year the US was ranked 17th on this yearly list, but this year we’ve fallen to 20.
This slip in the rankings is mostly due to the fact that businesses are being strangled by oppressive regulations and crushed by rampantly greedy unions. But it also due to the end of the rule of law in the US as government ignores laws, re-tooling them and warps them at will in order to feed its rapacious appetite for complete control of our lives. And most especially the sharp rise in abuse of eminent domain rules allowing government to steal private property on a whim has contributed to American’s loss of freedom.
“Since the year 2000, the U.S. has been on a decline in terms of economic freedom,” Co-author of the report Ian Vasquez told The Daily Caller News Foundation on Wednesday.
“The U.S. performance is worrisome and shows that the United States can no longer claim to be the leading bastion of liberty in the world,” the study says. “In addition to the expansion of the regulatory state and drop in economic freedom, the war on terror, the war on drugs, and the erosion of property rights due to greater use of eminent domain all likely have contributed to the U.S. decline.”
This is a similar decline as that found in the list of the most economically free countries. Last year it was noted that in the year 2000 the US was ranked as the second most economically free nation in the world but by 2014 the US had fallen to the 12th most free.
Here is the top 25 freest nations in the world according to the Cato list:
- Hong Kong
- Switzerland
- Finland
- Denmark
- New Zealand
- Canada
- Australia
- Ireland
- United Kingdom
- Sweden
- Norway
- Austria
- Germany
- Iceland
- Netherlands
- Malta
- Luxembourg
- Chile
- Mauritius
- United States
- Czech Republic
- Estonia
- Belgium
- Taiwan
- Portugal
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing news, opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that wrote articles on U.S. history for several American history magazines. Huston is a featured writer for Andrew Breitbart’s Breitbart News, and he appears on such sites as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, Wizbang.com, and many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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