 The world is considerably less free than it was in January 2020, right before the COVID-19 pandemic. That was the theme of a recent conversation that Reason had with Ian Vasquez, who's one of the co-authors of the annual Human Freedom Index produced by the Cato and Frasier Institutes. 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. In 2020, what we see is that just the freedom falls off of a cliff. And America, once among the leaders on the Freedom Index, has taken a particularly bad slide in the rankings. It now sits as the 23rd freest country in the world. Governments tend to claim vast new powers over our lives in times of war or crisis, and then rarely give them all back. To unleash the full power of the federal government in this effort today, I am officially declaring a national emergency. Two very big words. Vasquez points out that the recent decline in freedom goes back to the collapse of the financial industry 15 years ago. And before that, the attack on the Twin Towers and ensuing war on terror. The year 2007, which is really the global high point of human freedom, that coincides with the global financial crisis, which came the next year. And we see a steady decline of human freedom up through 2019. Vasquez says this is largely because of a steady growth in the size of government and erosion of the rule of law. Do people think that the rules of the game are fair or are being imposed in an arbitrary way? It really started with the beginning of the Bush administration. And we think that that's due to a lot of things, 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 when you have the rules of the game not viewed as fair, that's a real threat to other freedoms. As reason has covered extensively, the pandemic emboldened public health officials and politicians to do things that had no bearing on safety, such as closed beaches and playgrounds and restrict our movements. They made it harder for landlords to collect rent. They gave out billions of taxpayer money without any strings attached and they arbitrarily shut down entire industries without any rational justification. On November 22, Los Angeles became the only county in America to ban outdoor dining this winter for a minimum of three weeks. 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. 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 we will be, you know, as always, we'll watch our data. 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. The good news for America is that checks and balances do still exist. Federal judges smacked down several governors who overreached and the Supreme Court declared the Biden administration's use of a federal workplace safety agency to impose a vaccine and test mandate on private employers to be unconstitutional. But even countries with relatively strong institutions can lose those protections quickly if they aren't vigilant. It happened in Hong Kong, starting in 2014 with the ascendancy of Xi Jinping to power in China, which culminated in the near complete takeover of the local Hong Kong government and jailing of dissidents following the 2019 pro-democracy protests. 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. Now that President Biden has officially ended the national emergency in a terse one-sentence statement, what can be done to stop and reverse this trend? There's a story that Benjamin Franklin, when asked about the ideal form of government, replied, a republic, if you can keep it. The same might be said of the ideal social arrangement, freedom, if you can keep it. The bad news is that the federal government is bigger than ever and it's spending America ever further into debt with less and less to show for it. Trust and confidence in our institutions continues its decline. 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. I very much view Trump as a Latin American populist. He didn't come out of nowhere. Something was going on in the United States that led people to think, hey, you know, the rules of the game aren't fair anymore. We don't trust this institution or that institution. But the sudden loss of liberty that the government response to the pandemic brought may have awakened a new appreciation for what freedoms we do have and a newfound desire to expand them. Protests and disobedience made many pandemic restrictions untenable, the most restrictive and dysfunctional cities and states lost population. Many people woke up to the cozy, sensorious relationship between big tech and the government. Parents fought district officials and unions to reopen schools, expand school choice and undo scientific mandates. We believe a parent has the ultimate authority, the ultimate right to the fundamental right to guide and direct the upbringing, the medical care and the education of their children. The world was once trending towards freedom. Maybe it can again. What Vasquez's work also shows is that the struggle is worth it. It does appeal to a lot of people to be the author of their own lives. So there's an inherent value. But beyond that, we also know that freedom plays a central role in human progress. We can see the strong relationship between freedom and prosperity and indicators of human well-being across the board. That is a huge triumph of classical liberalism. 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 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. Hey, thanks for watching. If you'd like to see our full unedited conversation with Ian Vasquez about the state of human freedom in the U.S. and worldwide, click here. For an excerpt from that conversation, click here.