Subjectively, the enterprise favors the small, tidy, homogeneous, socially conformist freedom of the Scandinavian type. Only Norway, Sweden, and Finland score 100. (The guy in the Viking hat seated in Mike Pence’s chair during the invasion of the Capitol Building wasn’t really a Viking.) The enterprise does not favor the kind of rancorous, raucous “Hold my beer an’ watch this!” freedom that America has. The U.S., although rated “Free”—damn right!—receives a Freedom in the World Total Score of just 83. That’s the same score as Romania. I visited Romania when I was on the Freedom House Board of Trustees. I interviewed the Minister of the Interior. I asked him, “What is the most serious problem you face in Romania?” He thought for a moment and said, “Packs of wild dogs.” And let me tell you—as I learned while getting back to my hotel from the Ministry of the Interior in Bucharest after dark—he wasn’t kidding. The Freedom House quantification process obviously isn’t perfect. But processes aren’t. And now, looking back on it, I realize that Freedom House at least gives us some numbers to work with—numbers that are arrived at using a consistent method and that are useful for broadly comparative purposes. Another imperfect process giving us some numbers to work with is the International Monetary Fund’s calculations of per capita gross domestic product. GDP itself can be hard to figure out, governments being the fibbers that they are. And simply dividing a country’s GDP by the number of people who live there doesn’t tell us how the swag is split. For example, the U.S. 2020 GDP was about $21 trillion. What if (and I think MSNBC would like you to believe this) Donald Trump and his wives, his children, and his in-laws were taking $20,999,999,999,000, leaving only $1,000 to be divvied up by the rest of us? This would make us a poor country even though we had a rich-looking per capita GDP of $63,051. But, again, per capita GDP is useful for broadly comparative purposes. Freedom House’s Freedom in the World Total Scores tell us—sort of—how free a country is. And the IMF’s per capita GDP figures tell us—sort of—how rich a country is. But when we put the two sets of numbers together they tell us —for sure—what the value of freedom is. Compare two large, frozen, thinly populated nations with economies driven by resource extraction: Canada – Freedom Score 98, p/c GDP $47,569
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online