The 12 Categories of the Human Freedom Index:
Rule of Law
Security and Safety
Movement
Religion
Association, Assembly, and Civil Society
Expression and Information
Identity and Relationships
Size of Government
Legal System and Property Rights
Access to Sound Money
Freedom to Trade Internationally
Regulation
I Opened the Fraser Institute's Website to see if I could get an updated version and found that the latest was from 2019.
Obviously the catastrophic change in what we see as everyday freedoms took a nose dive in 2020. The Human Freedom Index (#HumanFreedomIndex #HFI), is a ranked list of countries. So as most of the countries that did Covid-1984 together the rankings shouldn't have changed much. *It strikes me as strange that Sweden and Japan, being the only country that didn't have forced stay at home orders. Whereas New Zealand was put at the top.
Small Subset of the Human Freedom Index By Country and Year
| Canada | Australia | Sweden | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 8.65 | 8.02 | 8.50 |
| 2020 | 8.64 | 8.68 | 8.52 |
#HFI by country 2019
#HFI by country 2020
The absence of change in the scores in these countries is very telling of the index itself. It was Sweden that continued to allow freedom of Movement, and assembly. Whereas in Canada and Australia saw the worst loss of freedom of movement among all of the countries. Canada only lost a 0.01 in value. Australia gained in value. Where as they were the worst for restricting people's movements. How can it be they gained in 2020?
I am forced to wonder where these numbers come from? The source I am looking at has the URL: https://worldpopulationreview.com/. I can see why the authors of the Fraser Institute lost enough respect for the index that they stopped posting it on their website.
Metrics for Freedom
Rule of Law
Rule of Law can mean various things. We should consider the words written down to be laws but often "the law" simply is considered the enforcers and the law makers and judges. The fact that government officials don't follow their own rules should be reflected in the score. They certainly are not.
So it comes down to some degree how the counter balancing branches of government are respected.
Certainly laws consist of "do this" and "don't do that." If you take all of the laws written still in effect1 in a given country, and print them with a single font size on legal sized paper with the standard weight. Freedom is inversely proportional to the height of this pile of paper.
Really the size of the law itself is something of a factor to consider.
Security and Safety
Certainly when people are afraid to go outside because of warring parties in their neighborhood, there is a lock-down from fear present. El Salvador welcomes its new dictator because he has cracked down on warring criminals. However the same individual, or someone who gets his position later could later weaponize the same security forces against folks for anything. Although the people are happy now, I suspect they will be in for a very negative future.
In spite of these arguments I don't put security in the realm of freedom. It is important though of course.
"If we trade freedom for security, we will eventually lose both."
Movement
COVID lock-downs meant removal of freedom of movement. Though the politicians did not respect these new edicts they imposed on others. Took international flights to meet with each other proving their lack of sincere belief in either the deadliness of the disease or the chance of infection from simply leaving their homes. Movement is an important aspect. Why aren't several African and Sweden at the top rankings right now for this alone?
Religion and Association, Assembly, and Civil Society
Religion and freedom of assembly during COVID is something we should reflect that in western countries has taken a huge hit. As people were not allowed to attend church.
Expression and Information
Well access to the Internet and a lack of government interference thereof. This is becoming and has been a great problem in Europe. When you consider a certain world war 2 narrative in which people are jailed for questioning. It not only puts the Europeans with a low credibility for freedom, but also puts the narrative itself at a low credibility score.
"A ship is safe in the harbor but that is not what ships are for."
Identity and Relationships
I don't know what this really means here. "Identity" is such a loaded word.
Size of Government
One could take the sum of public salaries divided by the sum of private and public salaries. There may be creative ways of doing this but I have not seen any methodology named here.
Legal System and Property Rights
For property rights there cannot be any confiscation powers by government. Especially not for big ticket items. Those who are familiar with the terms, I am referring to asset forfeiture. I have yet to find a country that always respects the property of those living there. I am not saying that confiscation is universal among the state actors. Apart from regular taxation, there are code words for the legalized theft: asset forfeiture (spelling?). Imagine someone trying to look up the concept in English who had never heard the special term of art.
Access to Sound Money
Basically this boils down to being able to buy bitcoin and bitcoin like cryptocurrencies, or precious metals.
We Should Transcend the Left-Right Idea that Only the Government or Only the Corporations
During COVID the two worked in concert. Regulators routinely get nice paying jobs from those they were supposed to be impartially regulating. Employees of the CDC have patents on drugs. The fight against individual rights come from both sides. So even a minimalist government if they exist to protect corporate monopolies is not even better than a maximum government.
The size of government and safety are concerns. I am not sure whether these really belong on the Human index.
When giving a student a score, tests are established and refined over time. Most of the time these tests, determine whether a student knows how to do certain things or know certain things. The score number is a combination of each aspect of knowledge. So that a student performing worse will get a lower grade than another performing better (within the same year). This "Human Freedom Index" doesn't reflect what has happened here.
I think we could pick a boolean list of aspects for freedom which are very important:
- never had a poll tax?
- never had a haircut tax?
- asset forfeiture?
- ever had forced sterilization?
- has forced or obligatory for X or Y medical procedures?
- ever had imprisonment without due process?
- inflation tax?
- can we leave it?
I think we could work with this list and create some kind of better list. What do you all think? Do you think I left something out?
1 Amendments which would modify laws and repeals of laws would count as negative at times and negative respectively.
Posted with proof of brain