A blog with a name like Unbiased America is automatically suspect in my view, since if there is anything more fictional than the idea of an unbiased blog—or for that matter an unbiased respected news source—I don't know what it is. Nonetheless, their article How Free Is Your State? has elements of interest.
Liberty is a great deal of what America is all about, or at least what it once was all about, and I believe the value still resides deeply in our hearts. How we define the concept, however, is one of the sad fracture lines that now divide our country. I rarely give much credence to other people's rankings of the best country to live in, the most child-friendly nation, the best state to retire to, etc. because my criteria for those categories are usually quite different from the ones used in the rankings.
That's the beauty of this Unbiased America site: it's customizable. Their own rankings, below, include many factors I either don't care about or actually care in the opposite direction. Nonetheless, I can look at the states I know something about and find a good deal of agreement on the level of freedom. Note, my New Hampshire friends, that you rank #1. Florida's not too bad at #8.
But you're not stuck with the website's somewhat bizarre criteria. You can create your own customized version, picking which factors are considered, though you must choose from their selection and sometimes it's hard to tell what "freedom" means for a given criterion. I created my own, quick-and-dirty map, giving importance to things I care for, such as educational and food freedom (e.g. homeschooling and the right to buy raw milk), but not to things I consider more license than liberty, e.g. liberal gambling and marijuana laws. New Hampshire is still #1, but Florida has moved up to the Top 5.
Go ahead, try it for yourself. You're still captive to the biases of Unbiased America, but you can skew them in your favorite direction.
