 Welcome to the Reason Livestream, which is pre-taped today because of some scheduling issues. I am Zach Weismuller, joined by my colleague, Nick Gillespie and Ian Vasquez, Vice President for International Studies at the Cato Institute, and one of the co-authors of the 2022 Human Freedom Index, a joint effort put out annually by the Cato and Frasier Institutes. Today, we're talking about the state of human freedom in this post-COVID world and part of the reason we're talking about that is because President Joe Biden has officially ended the national emergency around COVID. A lot of us thought it had been over for a while, but I guess it's official now. But before we get into that, let's have a flashback to a little over three years ago when Trump first declared the national emergency in March 2020. To unleash the full power of the federal government in this effort today, I am officially declaring a national emergency. Two very big words. The action I am taking will open up access to up to $50 billion of very important and a large amount of money for states and territories and localities in our shared fight against this disease. Okay, so and now with quite little fanfare, this, the White House announced the bill in a one sentence statement saying, H.J. Resolution 7, which terminates the national emergency related to COVID-19 pandemic, has been signed into law by the President. What's, how are we all feeling about the official ends to the national emergency? Dan? Well, I think that, as you said, many of us thought that that emergency ended a long time ago. So in a very, very real sense, I think Biden is just catching up to the rest of the country in this regard. I mean, most states moved on a long time ago from the restrictive measures that were imposed by them and remember that most of the restrictive measures were in the United States imposed by the states and localities. And those have been long gone. We've had most Americans, the vast majority of them, had immunity or have been vaccinated. So it doesn't pose the threat that it did early on when we didn't have that kind of information. So this is a long past due. My main thoughts were, when you juxtapose Trump and then Biden, we're really going from strength to strength in Presidents, right? And I think Pence might have been blinking an SOS message like a Vietnam POW in that earlier clip to follow up on what Ian was saying. It's clear that in many profound ways, the states and localities certainly have moved on, not completely but fully. I think people have more. But there's always this question, and I know we'll talk about this later, when you have these massive events, we could also be talking about the financial crisis. We could be talking about 9-11. We could be talking about the Red Scare in the 50s. You don't know fully, like the event is over and we seem to have moved on, but there's always these weird kind of tendrils that continue into the future and into the present that motivate a lot of policy or attitudes that don't really become clear until much later into the future. And I worry about that a lot. Yeah. And just at the state level here, this is a map of the states that still have public health emergency declaration in place. There's seven of them. One of them happens to be Texas, which might be surprising to hear, but when you dig into it, it's because Texas has the state of emergency in place so that it can override local mask restrictions and vaccine mandates and so forth. So there's some still hanging on. I know my former state of California just rescinded theirs a couple of weeks ago and now Gavin Newsom is doing a tour around the country to talk about it. But yeah, this is the end of an era and I guess we'll see, as you're saying, Nick, what lingers. And that's kind of the topic for today, because Ian is one of the co-authors of the Human Freedom Index, which actually, before we get into that, maybe you could just explain to our audience what exactly that is. Sure. The Human Freedom Index is a global measurement of economic, personal and civil freedoms around the world. And so what we do is we take 83 distinct measurements of freedom in areas ranging from the rule of law or safety and security or the size of government or freedom of speech, freedom of association, 12 big categories, but 83 distinct indicators for 165 countries. And then we put that data together to come up with what we think is a reasonable picture of freedom, human freedom, within countries and at a global level. And when we say freedom, we have an idea of what we mean by that. Everybody has their own definition of freedom. George Bush did, Hugo Chavez did, Al Qaeda did, everybody does. By freedom, we mean the absence of coercive constraint, the idea that you can lead your life as you choose as long as you respect the equal rights of others. And that's what we're measuring. And so it's really the first serious systematic measurement of broad human freedoms for a big set of countries and the data that we're using spans two decades now. So it's very useful to look at trends and freedom as well. Kim, before we go into what happened, the most recent version goes through year 2020, right? That's right. I mean, one of the things that you find out when you start working on international data is that there's usually about a two-year lag to be able to compare data. And so the latest data includes 2020, which of course is the pandemic year. Right. And could you also, because what the first year that you published this was what, 2017? Is that right? So this is the, so this is our eighth edition. It was 2015, but we've been adding data and adding back years as data becomes available as well. So now we have two decades of data. Can you just very quickly say like going back 20 years, until 2020, and we're, you know, we'll talk a lot about 2020 because that's like, you know, a big year. But what, you know, is the arc of freedom bending towards light or dark, you know, up until 2020? What was the general trajectory? So what we see is with beginning in the year 2000, which is the year for which we have complete data, is human freedom being high, relatively high, certainly compared to decades passed by what we know, and continuing on an upward trajectory up until the year 2007, which is really the global high point of human freedom that coincides with the financial, global financial crisis, which came the next year. And we see a steady decline of human freedom up through 2019. And of course the big, and then everything, you know, freedom breaks out everywhere, right? Yeah. And then in 2020, what we see is that just freedom falls off of a cliff. So you see this steady decline in personal and economic freedoms, economic freedoms were fairly pronounced. And then you see this huge drop in virtually every category of freedom that you can think of in the year 2000, setting back 2020, setting back the world more than 20 years. So what does that mean? I'm just like, you know, the difference between say 7.3 and 7.0, can you, you know, is that the difference between having a 95 and a 65? Or is it the difference between, you know, a 95 and thinking of, you know, cool test, a 95 and a 90? It's a big, it's a big difference. Because, you know, the range of freedom in the world, we use a scale of zero to 10. The range of freedom in the world is not zero to 10. The range of freedom is usually between four point something and nine, something like that. And this is a global average. So it's taking into account all North Korea and Switzerland, right? We don't actually measure North Korea because we can't, the data doesn't exist. But yes, we're talking about... You're pretty sure they're going to be in the bottom, they're going to be in the bottom half at least? Except that one of the things that we noticed is that some of the countries that were already low, like very low, like Venezuela and so on, they were already pretty much rock bottom and they didn't, there's not much more for them to fall. So the drops really were coming from a lot of countries that were relatively free. I mean, countries all around the world saw drops, but we saw big drops in countries that are used to a higher level of freedom. And typically what we see from one year to the next is small movements in freedom in one direction or another. This is a very large movement for the entire world. And it's a movement that affected 94% of the world's population. So that from 2007 to 2019, you already had virtually 80% of the world's population seeing some decline in freedom. And then from 2019 to 2020, 94% of the world's population saw this dramatic decline. Can you put a little, when you talk about personal freedom, what are the big parts of that indicator? Is that kind of like sexual freedom? Is it freedom of movement? Is it freedom of expression? What goes into that category? We have several broad categories that we measure. One of them is the rule of law. So is there due process? Do people get tortured when they're arrested or taken in by the authorities? Another one is security and safety. If you live in a country where you're likely to be disappeared or even murdered on the street or beaten up, your human freedom is not that high. And there's a big variance in the world on those indicators. Freedom of movement is another one. Usually, we haven't seen much in the way of movement from one year to the next in that indicator of freedom of movement. But this year, we saw a huge movement for obvious reasons. But what we're measuring there is freedom of movement within countries and freedom of movement between countries in the sense of a country doesn't let you leave or it doesn't let you come back to country. And of course, in some countries, particularly the Middle East and North Africa, this particularly affects women in a way that it doesn't affect men. And by the way, we do have a measurement that takes into account differences in treatment of women and men on a lot of indicators in this index. We measure freedom of religion and that's kind of self-explanatory. Freedom of assembly association and what we call civil society. So freedom of assembly and association are important, but it's also important to be able to set up a civil society organization, whether it's the Garden Club or a political discussion club. And in a lot of countries, it's very difficult to do. Our friends, our libertarian friends in France tell us that it's virtually impossible to set up a libertarian think tank there. It's very difficult. And so we find surprising things there. Freedom of expression and information where we look at all sorts of indicators, you know, the ability to have access to the internet or international information, just freedom, press freedom, that kind of thing. And then what we call relationship freedoms is same-sex, our same-sex relationships, legal or illegal. In a lot of countries, they still are illegal. In some cases, it's just for men. In some cases, it's for women. Some cases, for both. What's the difference in treatment of women during marriage or during or after a divorce? What's the difference in that relationship under the law with their children? Those are the kinds of things that we measure that fall under the category of personal and civil freedoms. So you just laid out several different categories of freedom that you measured that account for this giant drop-off that we see in this graph in 2020. Could you dig a little bit into what were some of the policies worldwide that caused this hit? I pulled a page from your report here that shows some of these different categories. I mean, we see the largest declines are in movement as you alluded to earlier, expression and trade and religion is also on there. Did you break down specific policies that caused this or was how much of it, I guess the one question is how much of it was policy and how much of it was just kind of pure reaction to the pandemic since we're talking about the pandemic year here? Yeah, that's a good question because you might ask, well, but some of this had to take place as a response to the pandemic, even if it wasn't policy, people aren't going to be moving around and so on. But what we're measuring there are restrictions and for the most part, that's what we're for the most part measuring. And the chart that you just showed shows a 20-year movement of these indicators. And so freedom of movement, I think that was the one that saw the biggest decline over that period, but almost all of that decline occurred in the year 2020. And for obvious reasons, I mean, you remember, we travel internationally, came to a halt, travel locally in many places came to a halt. Certainly in a lot of countries, you couldn't even leave your house, you could be in serious trouble. So that was a big hit. Freedom of expression did too. I mean, what you could say about the pandemic or criticizing the government in many countries, rich countries and poor countries, democracies and non-democracies was restricted. And what media companies and even big tech companies could say came under scrutiny and under pressure in a way that was probably already happening, but even more so because of heightened tensions and health concerns and so on. Freedom of association, we know that people were not allowed to gather. This was a big issue. And the rule of law came under pressure and we see big falls in that because a lot of these things were adapted or implemented in an arbitrary way, favoring some groups and disfavoring others in, of course, in the less free countries in the authoritarian countries. This was done in a very random way to go after dissidents or political opponents and so on. Whereas in more advanced countries, there may be other reasons for that, political reasons, and maybe it was more subtle, but it still was happening. And that was denounced by human rights groups, including human rights watch and so on. This was not just a problem for a part of the world. This is a problem that rich and poor countries, democracies and non- democracies were facing to different differing degrees. And you talked about how, I mean, the real drop off came in more free countries. If you're in Venezuela, you're already pretty heavily restricted on a day-to-day thing. But I was thinking when you were talking about freedom of assembly or whatnot, I remember reasing running stories, I think it was in Mississippi of a church that was going to have a drive-in religious ceremony where people stayed in their cars and parked in a lot and didn't get out of their car. In a way, it was probably the best way to set up church in the future, where it's like you don't even have to get out of your car. But they were banned from doing that. And that's like, in the US, that's really fucked up in a way that in a country that is used to repression, it's like, okay, well, that's just Sunday or Saturday or whatever day we celebrate church on, we're constrained. I think that's right. And that kind of thing was probably among the most shocking for Americans or for people who were used to a high degree of freedom. We really haven't seen that kind of curtailment of freedom to that degree across such a wide number of freedoms in the United States. You have to go back to like World War II, really, probably, where there was rationing as well as curfews and restrictions on industrial inputs and things like that. Things were actually being diverted away from commercial activities into a war effort. Well, that's right. And not even during the financial crisis, did we see a drop in freedom that was this as severe as this? And I don't want to give the impression that the less free, more authoritarian countries didn't see a big drop in freedom. They did. In fact, we have a chart in the book that looks at which are the countries that most dropped in terms of freedom from the high point in 2007 through 2020. And the top 10 are all countries that were led by authoritarian regimes. But what I want to emphasize there is that that was an ongoing trend. And so what the pandemic did was was accelerated, whereas in liberal democracies and freer countries, the trend was a slower trend, and then there was a big drop-off in one year. So that's probably the difference in looking at one year to the next versus what was going on. And I mean, it's probably true to say that the pandemic accelerated a number of trends that were already happening in the world, including in rich countries. I think that the freedom of speech issue, which was already coming under pressure in liberal democracies, came under more pressure. And free speech advocates talk about a free speech recession that had already been going on in the world and in developed countries. And the pandemic accelerated that in rich countries as well. When you talk about rule of law being a major component of measuring freedom in a country, that was something that I observed and I guess experienced firsthand in a way I never had before during this pandemic. I was living in California, Los Angeles during the time. And it seemed that so many of the rules that were coming down because it was all done under an emergency order, there didn't have to be the same level of scrutiny by multiple levels of government. And I've got an excerpt here that I'm going to play in just a second of an example that was really striking to me was when the county of Los Angeles banned all outdoor dining. This was in 2021. So this was after the latest freedom index report. But the answers that they were giving to people as to why this was justified were virtually non-existent. And I'll just play the clip because you'll you'll hear the health director who had the power over this entire huge region that is you know is populated as many states. It was kind of just like it came down to what she believed was the right thing without any checks or bounds. On November 22, Los Angeles became the only county in America to ban outdoor dining this winter for a minimum of three weeks. This order could put out of business many California restaurants that were barely hanging on, some of which recently invested in retrofitting for exclusively outdoor dining. The worst part according to critics is that the public health agency issuing the order has provided no concrete evidence that outdoor dining is a significant source of COVID spread. I personally feel like we're being punished. LA public health director Barbara Ferrer held an online press conference on November 23 to discuss the order and estimates from the county's contact tracing that 10 to 15% of COVID transmissions are linked to dining experiences. Though she hasn't clarified how many of those transmissions were attributed to outdoor dining at restaurants and declined to provide the underlying data when pressed by reporters. Given that you haven't identified an actual source of an outbreak being an outdoor dining, how do you rationalize the closure and how do you expect to measure whether it actually is accomplishing what you're hoping to accomplish? We know that places where people are gathering without wearing their face coverings are places where transmission is easiest and most likely. But as always, we'll watch our data. It was always a kind of like we'll keep an eye on it. So my question is when you're measuring the rule of law or trying to quantify that, what are you looking at and how do you take things like states of emergency or states of exception into account when you're measuring that? So we're not, the rule of law is very difficult to measure. It's not like measuring a tariff raid or the size of government. That kind of thing is difficult. So it's based on what a lot of experts feel. I think that we use measures that are reasonable. But they're looking at the same indicators over time. And so the different indicators of rule of law that we look at are ones that have to do with contract, ones that have to do with private property protection, due process type indicators. And we're not making a special measurement to take into account emergency measures, whether they're justified or not. What we're seeing is a decrease in the rule of law. And part of the decrease in the rule of law because it's really partially a perceptions-based indicator, more than many others, is do people think that the rules of the game are fair or are being imposed in an arbitrary way and so on? And actually that matters in a free society. What the perception is of the rules of the game matters to be able to uphold the system of justice and other freedoms. So what we've seen is a deterioration during this time where I think you can make the case that there were a lot of arbitrary decisions being made. It's quite another question about whether that was constitutional at the state level or even at the federal level. But I think at least in the early parts of the pandemic, when we didn't have very much information about the spread or even about the disease, the courts were probably more reluctant to impose orders that overrode what the democratic system was deciding. I mean by middle and late 2021, we did have courts starting to smack down some of these governors and mayors. This is a little montage of headlines in Michigan, Pennsylvania, California, all got federal rulings against some of their restrictions, which were deemed arbitrary, discriminating against certain categories without any rational basis. The big one was obviously the Supreme Court smacking down the OSHA mandate that was requiring private employers to either vaccinate or test their employees. So it was a delayed, but there eventually was some sort of judicial intervention, I assume that in the future, Human Freedom Index, that that will be a mark in favor of rule of law in the US, that there is still some checks and balances in play here. Yeah, I would expect that. But again, we take the data and sometimes we might not agree totally with it, but we don't tamper with it. We take the data that third-party sources provide. Right. Can we show, Zach, could you show the chart that shows the decline in 2020? Again, Ian, is this, you know, in, yeah, that, I mean, first off, can you just very quickly, and what I'm thinking here is the old Robert Higgs book, Crisis and Leviathan, which is kind of, among other things, is a generalized theory of government power and the way that it grows, and that when there is a crisis, when there is a war, when there is an economic collapse, things like that, the government generally expands its power, and then after the crisis passes, it doesn't completely revert back to where it was, except in very rare instances. And, you know, you mentioned in 2007 being the peak, I mean, the global financial crisis seemed to usher in an era of, like, a lessening of, you know, of freedom, of human freedom overall. It climbs back a little bit. It starts going down, and then obviously COVID really hits. But my question, I guess, is broadly speaking, is this what you're, you know, what you're tracking is a kind of crisis in Leviathan mindset, and then, you know, in general, and then what explains the ramp up between 2000 and 2007? Like, why was the globe getting freer? Was there, you know, what was going on where suddenly, you know, people had more freedom? Yeah, those are good questions. Robert Higgs was mainly looking at the United States when he made that study, and so this is a global chart that was up on the screen. And so I hesitate to make such a broad statement about so many distinct countries around the world. But I do think that that analysis still applies to the United States. If you look at a graph of freedom of the United States, and particularly of economic freedom, what you see is, after the financial crisis, a decline in freedom, in economic freedom that was rather sharp, it lasted during a good part of the Obama administrations. But then at the end of the Obama administration, we see an uptick in economic freedom in the United States. You know, some of the some of the big spending came to an end as the country recovered and so on. And with Trump coming into office, we saw that continue in the first year or two. And then by the last part of his administration, we saw it come down, then obviously in 2020, it really fell off of a coin. And maybe I take your point that we don't want to generalize from the US experience to all other countries. But in the US, when Bush became president in 2000, and the Republicans, you know, ran the Congress, both as the Congress, in Bush's two terms, not only did we have the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but we also had effectively a 50% increase in the federal budget. Bill Clinton's last budget was around two trillion, by the time Bush left, it was like four trillion. You know, how did how, you know, was the was kind of governmental spending and increases in regulation and economically significant regulations, things that cost more than $100 million to implement. Was that being offset by other forms of freedom or? No, the United States doesn't track, if you look at the graph of freedom in the United States, it doesn't look like the global, the global graph, it didn't, it wasn't increasing. That's that's one of the worrisome things that we found, because you asked, why is there this increase? It's because all sorts of other countries were still increasing their freedom around the world, and not the United States. The United States is a very worrisome trend, starting from around the year 2000 of a long-term steady decline in freedom that then with the with the global financial crisis, it accelerated. And we especially see that beginning in the year 2000 in the economic freedom side of things, because of exactly the kinds of things that you mentioned. And out of the five different indicators in economic freedom, the broad categories that we look at, size of government, the legal system and property rights, sound money, freedom to trade and regulation, all of them saw notable drops during this period of time, except that the rule of law indicator saw the biggest drop. It was a very big drop, and that accelerated with the financial crisis, but that was already going on. And it really started with the beginning of the Bush administration. And we think that that's due to a lot of things, the wars, the war on terror, the war on drugs, the weakening of private property rights in the United States with the Kilo decision over a decade ago. I think that the financial crisis made things worse because there was a rise of crony capitalism, or at least what people perceived as crony capitalism were industries, and in fact, particular companies close to power got privileges and massive amounts of bailouts, even though that wasn't necessarily justified. And all of these things combined to weaken the rule of law because it's arbitrary. And at the very least, it's perceived as such. And when you have the rules of the game not viewed as fair, that's a real threat to other freedoms. But we did see other areas of freedom like government spending and monetary policy and freedom to trade start to go down as well. And this accelerated during the financial crisis, it started to recover some. And with the pandemic, it came down. Never did the United States recover its level of freedom that it had in the year 2000. When it when it used to rank at the top in the year 2000, the United States ranked sixth in our human freedom index, it now ranks 23. So there's this, this is a show that chart. Here's the ranking. We've got Switzerland, New Zealand, Estonia, Denmark, Ireland rounding out the top five. And then you go down US at 23 below Belgium and Austria and the United Kingdom. Pretty sad. Here's a breakdown of the analysis of the United States. As you mentioned, rule of law, is it a meager 6.3 movement, 6.4 affected negatively by the pandemic, of course, size of government, 6.8. What are some of the immediate steps that should be taken to reverse these trends and get the US at least back into the top 10 of freedom ranked countries? Well, I mean, there's a lot that can be done in terms of economic freedom. We're way below in economic freedom than what we were in the year 2000. And that's in terms of free trade, in terms of regulations, in terms of sound money. And in every indicator, we're below. And so all of those policies can be improved. The size of government is much larger today after Obama, after Trump, during the Biden administration. After Bush, it's just much larger than when Bush came in. If I may, in 2019, because when we talk about the COVID exception, 2019 spending, this was under Donald Trump. And it was a record at the time. The federal budget spent for, or federal government spent $4.4 trillion. In 2020, it spent $6.6 trillion in 2021, 6.8. Last year, it went down to 6.3 slightly. This year, it's estimated to be 6.4. And this seems to vindicate the Higgs hypothesis of a kind of ratchet effect. So it's gone down from 6.8%, but it's much closer to that than it is to 4.4, which was already insane compared to Bill Clinton 20 years earlier. That's right. So I think that that hypothesis is still valid for the United States after these crises. And there were several crises during the Bush administration, which did help to increase government spending at a time, at least in the first part of his administration, where the Republicans controlled the Congress and the executive. And that's oftentimes not a good thing. Yeah. And it's interesting now not to get too into weeds about government spending in America. But when Obama came in in 2009, he, of course, he won what was rightly considered a mandate at the time. And the Democrats took, they had control of the House, but they took control of the Senate. He did have a blank check for two years and spending went up. And they got everything they wanted, basically. And that elected a Republican Congress. And then things started leveling off. I mean, I'm not a huge fan of divided government because it's, at various points, it seems as if spending just keeps going up anyway. But at least in the late Bush years and the second half of Obama, things leveled off a bit because it seems a divided government put the brakes on certain aspects. So behind all of these trends is how people view government and how people feel about society and politics and so on. And one of the things that we see is when you look at the global picture and you see the high point in 2007, and then it starts going down with the financial crisis, that's a period of time where you really see the rise of different forms of populism during this subsequent period of time all over the world, authoritarian populism of the left of the right in a lot of countries just taking over and in a lot of political systems having a bigger say in politics, including in liberal democracies, has occurred in the United States, I would argue in both parties. What happened, I think, in the United States beginning during the Bush administration, which as I say had its own crises and expanded the role of government, so it was reducing freedom is if you look at the surveys by Pew and by Gallup, you see that over the past 15 to 20 years in the United States, trust in almost every institution in society starts coming down and it's hitting record lows on so many different institutions. We're talking about the media, Congress, the executive, things like the Catholic Church and philanthropies or actually also seeing businesses, big businesses and other kinds of businesses, and so when there is a loss of trust in the main institutions in society that mediate interaction in society, you're in Latin American territory and that's when Trump came in and I very much view Trump as a Latin American populist, but I think that he didn't come out of nowhere, something was going on in the United States that led people to think, hey, the rules of the game aren't fair anymore, we don't trust this institution or that institution. Yeah, and both he and Hillary Clinton, this was a striking to me in the rhetoric in 2016, they both explicitly said the system is broken, they offered different reasons for why it was broken, what was broken in it and how they would fix it, but it was fairly chilling and I think on some profound level accurate, I mean certainly there's a reason why they were the candidates and they were both saying the system is broken, you can't trust the system, the system doesn't care about you, it's not watching out for you. But of course they took no responsibility for that system and it's been a part of it, I think that's been a really big problem for, especially for the Democrats who have a lot of correct gripes about Republicans or Trump, they themselves have become at least a big part of the Democratic, they've become more radicalized, but they don't take into account the role that their ideas had and continue to have in creating the political polarization. I very much see the political polarization in the United States and what's going on now as a legacy of Obama and even of Bush, so unfortunately I don't think that there has been a great explanation so far or analysis of why that has happened and we can come up with a lot of plausible stories that I think can be compelling, but the fact of the matter is that this polarization and this rise of populisms either on the left or right or both has been going on all around the world in countries that are completely different from one another in terms of wealth, in terms of the political system, in terms of culture. I mean we're talking about this happening in Mexico and Chile, two very different societies and in India and in Hungary and the hardening of nationalisms and so on in Russia and in China, Turkey and in parts of Western Europe where major political parties have become radicalized or include very radical parties as part of their coalitions. Can you talk briefly, I mean you study and focus on Latin America and a lot of your work and you know this is one of the most tragic segments of the world or areas in the world where it seemed as if Latin America broadly speaking had been doing very well or you was moving in the right direction after the end of the Cold War. Many of the countries including places like Chile and Argentina had started to account for the autocratic governments that had ruled for decades and things like that and it just seems like Latin America is back to a kind of large basket case. What went on there and how did COVID either exacerbate or moderate that decline? Oh yeah, I mean COVID made things much worse. I mean what's happened in Latin America over the past several years is the return of the left and not just the moderate, modern left which had been alternating in power in many countries over the past couple of decades and sensibly upholding reasonable policies. I'm talking about the return of the populist left and that's been a huge disappointment. I think that much of it would not have happened if it weren't for COVID upending society and making people feel unsafe and that's when the opportunities, the political opportunities come out of the ward work and that happens in every country but in countries that don't have well established or long-standing institutions and institutional safeguards like the United States has, you can wash away all sorts of institutional progress or freedoms very quickly and I think that that's what's happened in a lot of Latin America. There has been progress in the region. It has been positive and the progress hasn't just been in terms of policies and institutions, in terms of greater freedoms and notably so over the past 20 to 30 years in the region, it's been in terms of every indicator of human well-being. Some countries much more than others and so we have as classical liberals or advocates of liberal democracy a big challenge because it's undeniable that the ideas that we uphold, the policies, the institutions, and the values are indeed what have led to the big increases in lifespans, the drops in infant mortality rates, the big access to safe drinking water, the big increases in per capita income in the countries that have most adopted these ideas and yet if success stories like Chile and Chile is one of the great developing country success stories of all time by any indicator, any objective indicator, the progress it's made just blows away the rest of Latin America if a country that has had so much success like that by implementing these policies can so easily elect a far left president on the argument that everything that came before was unfair and has to be overturned, which was the platform, then we have a big challenge because it's not enough to point to facts. We have to appeal to the moral argument of a free society and we have to appeal to sense of justice and then explain that because I think that every country in Latin America has a different explanation. I don't think there's one explanation for the rise of populism and the decline of freedom in countries around the world, but I do think that there are sets of factors and they explain more, particular factors explain more of what happened in this country that country in Chile. I think the role of ideology played a very big role in which the left created a narrative and took over it had a really hegemonic position in society and all the cultural institutions, the media, the universities, the even even businessmen didn't actually defend the achievements of a free society and the pillars of a free society so that in Chile everybody knew that the country was unfair, that inequality had grown, it had declined and Chile is less unequal than most of the than the average Latin American country now, that the same people are always getting rich and the poor are always at that level, that's not it's one of the most has most social mobility in many countries. The narrative was what was informing Chileans and there weren't enough and I know the people in Chile admire them who are on our side but there weren't enough of them making the moral case for this tremendous progress that Chile had achieved. So progress can be had incredible progress like that is unprecedented in human history can be had but nothing we can't be deterministic about it, it can be rolled back particularly if people believe that it's somehow unfair or that actually things are getting worse in the world and if that's the case then we have to roll back the policies and create new ones and make America great again by protectionism or something like that you know so I think that Chile has a bit is a warning story to the United States because there you had an ideology in this case of the left that was really informing everything and I find that particularly the ideologies of the left there are more insidious because they present themselves as being somehow morally superior whereas the ideologies of the far right are ugly on their face you know we don't like the foreigners and these guys are bad and these guys are enemies and they're and the ideology of the left purport to to be on the side of the the disadvantaged and so on when in fact we know that they're not and also leads to all the problems of loss of centralization and authoritarianism so I think we have to in the United States also be very watchful of that because in Chile it snuck up on society and and thankfully the Chileans have rejected a radical constitutional overhaul now they're going to start with another one so I'm not as pessimistic about Chile as I was you know last year but it's still going to take a step back but your your discussion of populism there you know makes me think about the question of democracy and like what role does that play in either securing or in other cases undermining freedom I mean in your report you kind of say that you you don't measure democracy as one of the components but that it's highly correlated with free societies so what exactly is the relationship between democracy and freedom because these populists can kind of harness a democratic energy to then later come in and impose anti-democratic authoritarianism so how do you view the the relationship as a whole that's right so we're not in our in our index we're not measuring excuse me as part of the index political freedom but we think that's important and and we measure you know democracy or political freedom separately in order to look at the relationship between human freedom and political freedom what we're looking at are are our actual indicators of freedom actual indicators of whether there is or isn't coercion and political freedom is is a mechanism to make decisions about whether the policy should be this or that and the policy could reduce your freedom or it could increase your your freedom what we find is that there is a strong relationship like you said between human freedom and democracy but that's just a overall relationship and we've seen I mean the Latin America is a good case study of this all of the authoritarianisms there in the last couple of decades came in as elected democracies that then proceeded to eliminate freedoms and for a large part of the time they were popular but there weren't the safeguards that we think of when we talk about liberal democracy and and so when I think about the optimal political regime I think of liberal democracy that's limited limited power and democracy itself is a very much much broader term and not and so I would say most democracies in the world are actually liberal illiberal democracies that can very easily turn into authoritarian regimes as clearly was the case in Venezuela clearly is the case in Nicaragua I think that's happening in El Salvador and then a few other places I think Mexico is under threat of that occurring Mexico is moving strongly in the direction of less freedom under the populist president there in a way that I think people outside of Mexico including in Latin America don't fully appreciate a kind of inverse example to that to what you're describing there in Latin America which has been just haunting and horrifying to me to watch unfold is the situation in Hong Kong and you use that as a case study in the human freedom index that this is showing Hong Kong's ranking we've we've all seen what's happened as China's reasserted the Chinese government has reasserted control over Hong Kong this is the ranking which essentially started in 2000 or you know right around there so right so this is showing you know the sharp decline in freedom of association and assembly starting around 20 what I guess 2015 there so I and I've got a clip from I covered Hong Kong I went over there amidst the protests that were happening I want to play a clip of some of the the demonstrators and the pro-democracy activists talking about what values are important to them and then get your reaction as to what has happened to Hong Kong and what lessons the world should draw from this example of a not very democratic but fairly liberal society backsliding so quickly four values that we are safeguarding are the freedom to speak our minds to take our political stance to protest without fear of being prosecuted 15 years ago we had a high level of freedom or freedom of speech in all in in various aspects but now it seems that we can feel Hong Kong becoming more and more like China in terms of political values I always believe that one of the biggest gap between Hong Kong and the Beijing government the emphasis on rule of law freedom freedom of speech human rights at the moment I have to say that I'm pretty pessimistic because it's just so difficult to stop China from extending the kind of power and control that they wish for in a way I think many of us are probably even thinking that what we're trying to do right now is to slow down the change in the wrong direction preserving whatever we got for one country to system at the moment so what what lessons would you draw from the example of Hong Kong well I mean the the fact of the matter is that Hong Kong is just a very unique case study this is a this is a country that was ruled colonial by Great Britain and then was handed over in 1997 to to to China under the agreement that it would still keep its autonomy and its its very free market system Hong Kong has long been number one in terms of economic freedom in our in our measurements I think that that's that's weakened the economic freedom ratings have started to weaken and so that made it a very unusual situation where you had high levels of civil liberties personal liberties and economic freedoms and based on a very strong rule of law which was part of the British inheritance and the kinds of policies that England and Great Britain were implementing of bigger government more regulation and so on back home were not adopted in Hong Kong so Hong Kong maintained that high level of freedom which is why it became one of the richest places on earth and and has been called appropriately so kind of a miracle economy but it didn't have political freedom and that made it very unusual I think that the the time when Hong Kongers began to call for more and more freedoms was really grew with with the handover to to Beijing because of course there was inevitably this uncertainty about what would happen and for the first 10 or almost 10 or 15 years actually China respected that and Hong Kong maintained a very high level of freedom and in a very strange situation occurred I I've traveled there a lot and during that time period I went and there were democracy activists who wanted to promote democracy and have more of a say over their own city and they tended however to be more left oriented so they wanted to impose more regulations on business and minimum wage laws and more welfare benefits and that kind of thing the kind of thing that is normal in most liberal democracies today but that really wasn't the case in in Hong Kong and it was Beijing that was opposing them at that time to be able to maintain the free market system this is the communist party in in China opposing them and the business community which would otherwise be favorable to democracy in Hong Kong didn't rely with the democracy movement because the democracy movement was vilifying the the business community so very odd politics occurred in which I think a lot of concepts were being confused and I went to the legislative council one day and one of their the famous pro-democracy advocates was there the legislative council is their their form of little congress with limited powers this guy was called Longhair that was his nickname and he was on the floor of the legislative council wearing advocating for more democracy and wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt and he's an enemy of the communist party in China who at that time was supporting the free market system so it's kind of a funny thing all of that changed when Xi Jinping came to power so what we see in Hong Kong today is really a reflection of his power grab in China and his rollback of the freedoms that China had been increasing and maintaining for the last several decades and which is responsible for the absolute transformation of China and making it a much richer and dynamic country he's rolling that back and and that's what he's doing in Hong Kong as well and that start and you can see that happening on the graph of Hong Kong around 2014 it just starts to go down and then more and more steadily and then of course in the year 2020 they passed the the national security law in Beijing which effectively took away Hong Kong's autonomy and reduced its its freedoms and changed the whole system do you think in China now and there are reports that you know mainland China now has a lower economic growth rate than most Asian countries pretty much for the first time in the past 20 or 25 years is that going to you know and and China certainly had a very brutal repressive regime related to covid you know this was you know and in many cases this was the first time people in the west started taking covid seriously when you saw the footage of you know people being you know nailed into their apartments and things like that so they couldn't move because they were suspected of or or had or had covid do you think that the economic slump of China will work to undermine you know the support or you know for Xi's regime if you know and and I guess I'm going back to it's a haunting question that or you know kind of paradox that you brought up that in a place like Chile you have rising prosperity but the narrative is that things are getting worse and worse and that has actual political effect in a place like China much more authoritarian country but if people are actually falling behind you know the the growth rates have slowed down their growth rates relative to other countries around them are slowing down will that you know will that have positive effects on pushing for for increased freedom in China well the Xi Jinping is already losing popularity because of the measures that they took during covid but I'm afraid that it's still not going to be enough because it already is a totalitarian regime they have a tremendous amount of police power and control in a way that wasn't the case at the beginning of his of when he came to power and he's just been extending that he's China is basically facing the dictator's dilemma which is that as a poor and authoritarian regime liberalizes economically and grows economically which is certainly what what China has done people by definition are more free and more prosperous I mean you the control of the economy is a control of life itself so when you liberalize you have more more freedom and then people are more independent of the state and also are going to want more of their other kinds and as we should point out also is you know Milton Friedman talked about this in you know things like free to choose and whatnot but in the 80s as once the economy in China was liberalized post Mao you know at the end of the decade you saw the democracy movement most spectacularly in Tiananmen Square Friedman was saying you know like once again I'm proven right when you get economic freedom people get rich wealthier people start to demand political freedom here we go and of course it didn't quite work out that way well but I think there's no question that the Chinese are more even today are much much freer than they were in 1980 and yeah certainly richer and so on what Xi Jinping is doing is that he's realizing that if he keeps going in the direction of liberalization and the growth that it that it produces the Communist Party is going to lose control because it's it's by definition that's the process that all sorts of authoritarian regimes that have liberalized economically have gone through and that eventually ending up with political freedoms and democracy chili did it Mexico did it Taiwan South Korea and so on and so forth and he doesn't want to lose control so what he's doing is he's rolling back those freedoms but that has a cost the cost is economic growth the cost is civil unrest and nobody knows what's going to happen I think that China is essentially an ungovernable country but it has become our totalitarian and that's the problem I think that there's going to be very hard times in China and it's it's not clear what direction it'll go but I'm hopeful that it will that it will remain an essentially ungovernable country and maybe that will open up some spaces for for change how do the economic how do you think the economic and either political or social freedoms work in concert in the other direction because I was thinking back to the example of the United States with this if we pull up this slide again of the different freedom indicators we've got you know we're sliding on things like rule of law and size of governments but then you go down to like personal relationships which would include same-sex marriages you know ability to divorce women's you know equal rights and relationships that we're at a perfect 10 there are these things just kind of is there a cleavage happening there or does one kind of tend to in a delayed fashion follow the other if we look at other examples around the world well one thing that we find remember that this is a 30,000 foot view of each of each country and of freedoms in general one thing that we find is that there's a strong relationship between economic freedom and personal freedoms I like to tell people who who appreciate personal freedoms that if you want to live in a country with a high level of personal freedom you better pick a country with the relatively high level of economic freedom because the two go hand in hand and we know that there's plenty of human rights advocates or advocates of freedom of the press or people who have good intentions to promote certain freedoms that don't fully appreciate economic freedom or or even hostile to it and so this is a that's an important finding empirical finding that comes out of this study but I don't think that we can say that there's this regularity when this goes up this other thing goes down in three years or with a two-year lag it's not as simple as that I mean I think that in the United States as we've seen both personal and economic freedoms have gone down but you're right there are things like relationship issues that are much better now than they were 10 years ago and notably so I think that this is something that we don't measure because there's not reliable international comparable data but drug drug prohibition or drug freedom I think that has improved in the United States not as much as we might like so that's an improvement but other things like freedom of expression I think are I have become more problematic in the United States even if the First Amendment is still strong we have cultural issues and that's important of freedom of expression and and you want to maintain a a culture that is supportive of freedom of expression or more broadly speak tolerance rather than intolerance of various different views and lifestyles and I think that that's that's that's a big problem for a free society and we we're still in the United States wrestling with that yeah can I also just to kind of expand a little bit on what what counts as economic freedom one of the things that particularly for American libertarians is that we assume all of Europe is somehow you know a left-wing haven and whatnot and again I mean both your economic rankings as well as you know the Heritage Foundation and Simon Fraser University you find reliably countries like Sweden you know having a higher rate of economic freedom on these indices and and you know whereas everybody's like Sweden is a socialist paradise could you talk a little bit about what are the economic freedom indicators that really that ultimately matter in terms of you know human freedom because it's not simply what the top mark top marginal tax rate is right what what goes into that you know that's a that's a tough question I mean when we when we measure economic freedom we're measuring size of government the the rule of law we're measuring sound money and regulation and trade those are the broad the broad areas and you know we've some years ago I asked Jim Gortney and the authors of the economic freedom what what do they think are what really is critical I think that at different stages of development you might have different answers right but one of the things that that that we found was that if a country doesn't improve its rule of law indicator above a certain level it doesn't tend to improve in other areas very much or grow as much as countries that continue to improve in that area so I think that the that the legal system that the rule of law indicators are are are critical especially as a country is developing and you know you have countries like Sweden like France like you know your western european countries the united states too that has a long tradition of a sound rule of law it came out of 800 years of building building that up and developing countries don't don't have that that is what that and limited government historically is what led to the the the rich world becoming rich it also allowed government the size of government to increase and and and I think that that's a decrease in in economic freedom but it's the kind of thing that can happen in a country that has sound institutions that lead the to wealth and then you can make what I would call a mistake and not pay for in the same way that is true of developing countries that don't have that institutional basis and when they make mistakes it costs them more because they're poorer and it has a bigger a bigger cost so comparing Sweden with with the united states Sweden has higher taxes and a bigger welfare welfare state but you know it's also a relatively free free trade country its regulations are not that that high it has things like many european countries that are freer school choice no minimum wage things like that that yeah so the labor regulations not not counting minimum wage it's much harder to fire somebody in sweden but it's much easier to run a business otherwise and I think you know one of the achilles heels or or maybe blind spots of the american libertarian movement has been that it you know it doesn't do nuance very well it just looks at the percentage of government spending you know as a as an expression of GDP and if it's bigger then it's worse and it's not always that case and and I know Zach is going to ask you a final question but before we get to that you had talked about you know the decline in trust and confidence in institutions in the united states and if you go back uh you know both in the book that I wrote with Matt Welch the declaration of independence and in a story I think in 2019 I talked a lot about that this has become it started becoming a fixation of mine in the bush years because the decline in trust in the confidence of government and you know virtually every aspect of society just became so apparent and if you go back to gallup and a couple of other polling services it really starts in the late 60s and the early 70s for absolutely good reasons a lot of businesses but especially government you know and especially the federal government has just lied and cheated and done poorly and not owned up to its mistakes not tried to fix it the question between the hollowing out of trust and confidence in government and other institutions what is the contribution do you think that libertarian rhetoric has made over you know the past half century um or so because the argument that libertarians always make is that government or an increasing number of people within the libertarian movement say government is always incompetent you know at best it's incompetent at worst it's actually malevolent and and it has evil intent we hear that again and again Reagan you know very famously and successfully co-opted libertarian rhetoric when he said you know the government isn't the answer to your problems government is the problem um do libertarians do you think and you know you you use the term at one point classical liberal um you know do libertarians need to do a better job of kind of sussing out what is the legitimate role of government and what are the legitimate functions versus this blanket condemnation which very much goes to complaints you know that lead to populism that government is corrupt government is evil government is inefficient etc probably so i think that the term size of government has been misused a lot to to only mean how much government spends and the contribution of libertarians i think is to have a proper skepticism of power that's what you saw in the nine in the 1960s and so on and i think that that was a healthy thing absolutely whereas the kinds of fall and trust that i think we've been seeing now has been a skepticism of institutions themselves almost that this is my own particular read of things and you know throw throw it all out we can't trust any of it and i think maybe that's that's grounded in in something and that something is what we as libertarians have to get a hold of i think that the the the right way to talk about things is the proper role of government people think the size of government is too big and it turns off some people because it it it doesn't necessarily mean imply i don't know i i think that the economists among libertarians have mostly made that argument and while i think it's correct it doesn't really capture everything and and most people don't think in those terms to begin with and so you want to i think talk more about the proper role of government and i think that we need to um ask ourselves why in the last 15 20 years in the united states we've seen this decline in in trust how is it different than another time and i don't feel like um many people are asking that question well or answering that question well enough and i think that that libertarians probably have can have a better insight into that thank you yeah so the the if the proper role of government is at least in in my mind to protect these freedoms that you are trying to measure it does i want to return to that question i actually have two final wrap-ups but they're they're related and the the first the first is um that question of what is freedom what is this freedom that is worth protecting um and you laid out that there's a lot of different different definitions of freedom and you are focused on one very specific definition why could you just make the case for why that is the proper definition or why that is the thing that we should be focused on increasing in countries around the world and and by the way the definition am i right to say that it's fundamentally it's freedom from coercion that's right and i think you know not everybody has to agree with that and indeed not everybody does some people just totally disagree with that but i think that it does appeal to a lot of people to be the author of their own lives and it does have us an appeal to people to say people should have the right to express their conscious to talk about what they think as long as they're not harming somebody to worship in the way that they want as long as not harming somebody and so there's an inherent value the first and most important reason to use that as a definition is because there's an inherent value and even if you are the type of person that believes in all sorts of other freedoms positive freedoms like the right to have a house and that kind of thing which i don't really think they're true rights um most of those people even though they're in contradiction also believe in freedom of expression and these other freedoms and so i think that it has as wide appeal as you can can get uh with people but beyond that we also know that freedom plays a central role in human progress we can see the the relationship uh the strong relationship between freedom and prosperity and indicators of human well-being across the board and that's important to point out as well so when um when countries uh have less freedom they just don't have as as higher highest standard of living as the countries that have high freedoms one of the things that we've noticed in this era of globalization though is that there's been a tremendous improvement in human well-being all around the world that's that's a that is a huge triumph of classical liberalism because we're talking about a world that has become more free uh not just within countries but globally and one of the the worrisome aspects of the united states loss in freedom is the following when you look at countries that are less free even in those countries even in countries that have that haven't done much to improve their freedom you see notable improvements in human well-being what is literally happening is that the free countries are lifting up all of humanity because in the poorest countries you see people using cell phones taking medicines that are invented and in free countries benefiting from capital that comes in from free countries the freedom of the free benefits not only the free it benefits everybody as hyac observe more than 50 years ago and i think that uh this is a good example of that and so that's one more reason why the loss of freedom in the united states is really bad knows not just for americans but for the world i would you know not to launch us into a six hour conversation about this but with the mention of hyac i think it's worth thinking about i i agree fundamentally that freedom from coercion is a fundamental perhaps the fundamental part of any definition of freedom but hyac in books like the constitution of liberty and elsewhere also talked not quite in terms of positive rights that you have a right to a house you have a right to a job but that he believed in a social welfare state uh that oftentimes i find in conversations with most people who call themselves libertarian would say any transfer payment is not just ineffective and inefficient but is immoral and it's interesting because hyac as a classical liberal did not believe that he was supported a social welfare state and that one measure of freedom and i don't know how you do this without you know just opening up like an endless you know uh expansion of this but that if you don't have uh you know if you don't have the ability or the freedom to participate in society because you are born poor and there is no education offered you or you know you you grow up in certain circumstances that you know negative negative freedoms don't quite get to a flourishing society um that is going to continue to grow yeah so there is uh an argument for some base uh level of of helping out the the less fortunate but you know we're so far away from that world with the best welfare states and this functionality of of big government that i'm i'm happy to have that discussion when we when we actually have to to deal with that uh reality instead i think that what what we have is a situation where libertarians point to this move toward greater freedom in many countries around the world and including in the united states up until the year 2000 or whatever um but there needs to be probably a lot more drilling down because most people in their lives are not assessing every single aspect of freedom and weighing it on the same right uh scale um maybe what's happened in the united states is that some things that um didn't used to be political are much more politically decided today even if monetary policy is better than 30 years ago and so much more is at stake with the political system that affects people's lives than used to be the case and maybe that's what people are reacting to i heard mark and reese and i think it was him say um you know all these things are are becoming better but if you look at um housing and education and health care um even though everything else has seen prices drop those prices of skyrocket of course that's where government is more involved but people right that's where that's the american dream right but it's also true i mean this is where you know it's also true that housing is better health care is i mean it's much more expensive but it's also that's right increased right that that's that's right too um i don't know about education i don't know but i you know one of the other things that is interesting and you see this at you know uh zach you had shown that side of texas uh you see this in texas and florida which are the two you know most successful large population states of the past 20 years really probably the past 50 years but in each of them because of covet or partly under the auspices of covet you've also seen a shift at what level do political decisions get made uh they are much more likely to be made at the state house or in the governor's mansion rather than in the local school district uh or like that local businesses can't decide certain things we saw this again and again and that's an interesting wrinkle in you know in in kind of levels of freedom in america you know i i think everybody would probably agree that texas and florida compared to say california and new york are much more free uh state certainly economically and and their economies kind of reflect that they're growing that's where people are moving and yet at the same level we're starting to see the governor's assert that i have the right to say what books are taught or what what the curriculum is everywhere uh what businesses can and can't do what masking policy uh things you know it it's an interesting question to ask i i don't think we'll um have the time to get into it but you know in the wake of covet what are the long tail kind of shifts that may end up re you know kind of uh re-centering american politics and particularly what counts as a conservative your way of governing versus a liberal one uh you know 20 years ago certainly conservatives were all about local control uh you know and certainly when barry goldwater was running for president 64 it's all about oh no let the states decide let the subgroups within the state decide things and now at you know interestingly we see um you know in these conservative republican states governor saying no no i get to decide that brings me to like what i would hope that you could reflect on last which is the effects the political effects that that that we talked about at the beginning of the ending the end of this national emergency what uh because when i think about it you know that yes there has been this shift among you know conservative red state governors it's it's a kind of weird mixture of both using federalism to fight uh for more liberty in states but then also uh kind of an increased willingness to impose an ideology using state power versus those the woke corporations and all that but i i guess what what i'm when i look back and this your your study looks at 2020 which is kind of you know the depths of the pandemic we'll see what happens when you measure 2021 and 2022 my suspicion would be in some ways like we're gonna come out it'll it came out of that slump but there are things that have lingered and so is there my biggest worry is that we have this we had this national emergency and it's maybe primed the population and the systems to accept future emergencies for other things the flip side of that is that i think it's awakened in a lot of people an appreciation for freedom that maybe wasn't there before because then having to live under this sudden state of of unfreedom what where do you fall along that spectrum are you optimistic uh that we are going to reverse these trends here in the us are are you pessimistic or or is there some mixture that's a good question i think certainly we're not as free today as we were in january of 2020 the question you're really asking is at what level how much will we have recovered in which trajectory are we going to go i think that in economic freedom we're going in the wrong direction um we can probably expect that to continue um one of the i'll say one of the things that i said at the beginning of this conversation which is that uh covid really did accelerate a lot of the trends that were already happening in the united states and um when you have a situation where people are literally fearing for their lives and seeing that the government is not actually doing a good job at um securing that you know that does create incentives uh to give more power to the to the strongman to the guy that you know screw these institutions we're just going to do this and it'll be done in an arbitrary fashion which is what what happened to a large extent so um you know the politics of the united states has been transformed in the last several years the republican party is totally different than it was just a few just several years ago for that matter so is the democrat party and i think that we're going to recover freedom of movement we've already done that mostly we're going to recover freedom of assembly and association we've done that uh mostly freedom of expression i think that's still going to be um going to be a tough uh issue um rule of law i think that's still going to be a tough issue but there will be a recovery and um i don't want to give any prediction because i tend to be an optimist um but right now things aren't even though they're recovering they're not pointing in the great long-term direction but i do feel like there's also a backlash against uh this excessive uh power which is one of the great things about this country that's a great place to leave it thank you very much uh ian vasquez nicolespi our producer adam solovan and all of you who tuned in we will see you again next thursday thank you