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FRASER INSIGHT
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Issue 66 | Winter 2023
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Happy New Year! Welcome back to Fraser Insight, the Fraser Institute’s U.S. newsletter. This first issue of 2023 is highlighted by outputs related to the Economic Freedom of North America (EFNA) report.

As always, the In Focus section showcases in-depth research and analysis. This issue’s In Focus section features the latest EFNA report. Florida grabs the top spot, beating out second-place New Hampshire. New York is once again the least-free state. Along with the EFNA report, our In Focus section highlights a number of research-intensive essays on the costs and consequences of the disastrous government responses to COVID-19.

The In Print section, which highlights timely commentaries and op-eds, showcases essays on political and economic freedom, human freedom, and environmental issues.

Finally, our In Context section provides news about the impressive outputs of our EFNA Network [[link removed]], whose member institutions are doing amazing things to disseminate the EFNA report and promote its free-market message across the U.S.

We encourage you to share Insight with friends and colleagues by inviting them to sign up for Insight here [[link removed]]. Visit our website [[link removed]], which serves as a storehouse for cogent commentary [[link removed]] and in-depth analysis [[link removed]]—all from a free-market perspective. Follow us on Twitter [[link removed]]. Join us on Facebook [[link removed]]. And check out the In Touch section for more contact info.


In Print: Commentary and Review
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Freedom and the health of nations [[link removed]]
Fraser Insight
Economic freedom and political freedom are not abstractions. They are powerful forces with real-world implications. Their presence makes a positive difference in the lives of individuals and in the health of nations. Their absence shackles individuals and corrodes the nations in which they live.

Conventional plastic recycling doesn’t work—even Greenpeace says so [[link removed]]
Toronto Sun
Greenpeace, the iconic environmentalist organization, now says that traditional plastics recycling (separation, concentration of waste stream, thermal/physical reformation of plastics) does not work, thereby ironically agreeing with decades of critical research on recycling programs.

World Cup reminder—freedom improves the human condition [[link removed]]
National Newswatch
The World Cup has made it harder to ignore Qatar’s record on human freedom.

Conference in the Holy Land produces glimmers of climate policy sanity [[link removed]]
Calgary Sun
We may be seeing sparks of sanity emerging on the climate policy front. For the first time in memory, the United Nations Conference of the Parties ended with some reasons to be optimistic about the prospects of climate policy sanity in the year ahead.

Don’t blame hurricane damage on climate change [[link removed]]
Calgary Sun
We must inject some facts to counter the climate exaggeration. There’s no trend in actual landfalling hurricanes, but a significant trend in “losses.”

Once again IPCC’s math doesn’t check out [[link removed]]
National Post
Don’t let anyone tell you “the science” demands we simply accept the increasingly lethal climate policy agenda.


In Focus: Research and Analysis
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Economic Freedom of North America 2022 [[link removed]]
Economic freedom—the ability of individuals to make their own economic decisions about what to buy, where to work and whether to start a business—is fundamental to prosperity. This data-driven analysis of economic freedom in North America reveals that Florida holds the top spot, followed by New Hampshire (2nd), South Dakota (3rd), and Texas and Tennessee (tied for 4th). At the other end of the spectrum, New York is yet again the least-free state followed by California (49th), Hawaii (48th) and Vermont (47th). For the first time, the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico was included in the index.

The Abject Failure of Central Planning during COVID [[link removed]]
Just as with central planning of the socialist variety, central planning to deal with COVID-19 caused many misallocations. All of these problems became apparent, to those who were paying attention, in the way that the vast majority of governments around the world have dealt with COVID-19. Just as we have learned that central planning of prices under socialism does not work, so we should realize that central planning of markets, jobs, industries and human interactions during a pandemic does not work.

COVID-19: The Risk in Perspective [[link removed]]
The global reaction to COVID-19 was unprecedented. Government actions proposed, promoted, mandated and enforced to modify the risks to individuals and society as a whole were orders of magnitude more intrusive than any other risk-intervention policies ever promoted, proposed or implemented by most governments in the past. This was a truly radical global intervention by governments to control a novel biological risk. But the wildly diverging impacts and likely effectiveness, or ineffectiveness, of these various strategies suggest an equally wild divergence in the understanding of COVID-19 itself.

Politicized Science [[link removed]]
There have been worse plagues than COVID, but none has ever done so much damage to the world’s scientific institutions. In the pre-COVID era, the public health establishment had been gradually falling under the sway of progressives pushing their agenda, but it retained enough integrity to heed serious scientists—the ones who crunched data from past pandemics and randomized clinical trials. Those epidemiologists concluded that lockdown measures would do little or no good against a virus, while inflicting enormous social harm. But then, suddenly, all that peer-reviewed evidence and advice was discarded. Public health leaders adopted radical untested strategies without even pretending to do a cost-benefit analysis or explain why the pre-2020 plans were no longer valid. Lockdowns and mask mandates became “the science,” and those who questioned this “consensus” were declared “outside the mainstream.”

Measuring Morality: How Brain Chemistry Proves Natural Empathy [[link removed]]
A Fraser Forum podcast discussion.


In Context: News and Events
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EFNA Network Shares the Economic Freedom Message
Now in its ninth year, the EFNA Network [[link removed]] enfolds 59 member institutions in 47 states/territories, Canada and Mexico. From small state-based policy shops, to academic centers within major universities, to large think tanks with national reach, the Network comprises a range of organizations—all bound by a commitment to economic freedom and individual liberty.

As co-publishers of the EFNA report, Network partners are doing remarkable things to share the message of economic freedom with informed citizens, policymakers and media outlets all across the United States. In the past 14 months, for example, the Network has generated more than 200 media placements related to the 2021 and 2022 EFNA reports. The placements have appeared in dozens of statewide newspapers as well as multiple national outlets, including Real Clear Policy, American Business Review, The Hill and Forbes. In addition, several Network partners are using EFNA findings in testimony and materials shared with state lawmakers.

In that same timespan, the Network has grown to include the Frontier Institute of Montana, Economic Freedom Institute at Manhattanville College in New York, Instituto de Libertad Económica in Puerto Rico, Institute for the Study of Free Enterprise at Oklahoma State University, Georgia Center for Opportunity and Institute for the Study of Political Economy at Ball State University.

Since the Network’s creation in 2014, EFNA has been featured in or cited by media outlets and policy organizations in 43 states and territories; 80 scholarly publications, universities and think tanks; 34 national media outlets; 25 major statewide media outlets; and more than 175 local newspapers, radio stations, TV stations and other media outlets. These numbers represent an exponential increase in EFNA’s exposure since before the formation of the EFNA Network.

If your organization is interested in joining this dynamic and collaborative partnership of free-market institutions, contact Alan Dowd (managing director of the EFNA Network) at [email protected] [[link removed]]. For more information on the Network, click here [[link removed]].

In Touch: Connect with Us To learn more about our research team, visit our senior staff [[link removed]] and senior fellow [[link removed]] pages. We always welcome your feedback at [[email protected]]. To find out more about supporting the Fraser Institute, call (800) 665-3558, ext.568, or donate online [[link removed]].


STAY UP TO DATE
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The Fraser Institute is an independent Canadian public policy research and educational organization with offices in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, and Montreal and ties to a global network of 86 think-tanks. Its mission is to measure, study, and communicate the impact of competitive markets and government intervention on the welfare of individuals. To protect the Institute's independence, it does not accept grants from governments or contracts for research. To find out more, call (800) 665-3558 ext. 590.

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