Freedom By State
The Democrats believe people are idiots. Like Jacky Chan talked about his own Chinese people, the Democrats believe people need to be controlled. They tend to see Republicans as under-educated, hicks and red-necks who are incapable of making choices on their own.
Here is the study confirming this.
The Mercatus Center at George Mason University ranks each state according to how much freedom people have. They have three categories: social freedoms, economic freedoms, and another one I forgot. Here are the graph:
As you can see, the regression line bows under the weight of the oppressive Democratic rule on the right side of the graph. (It's a little counter-intuitive to put the Democrats on the right side, but we'll cut GM University some slack).
This is related to my earlier post on the study about how Republicans are statistically happier than Democrats.
The Democrat states allow less freedom because the believe people are mindless idiots. Especially in rural areas. They also presuppose that everyone is very moral so they generally believe moral vices should not be prosecuted.
(There's also another study showing Republicans are more educated than Democrats. I find this funny because Democrats think professors should make all the policy, but the Republicans are more educated.)
Here is the study confirming this.
The Mercatus Center at George Mason University ranks each state according to how much freedom people have. They have three categories: social freedoms, economic freedoms, and another one I forgot. Here are the graph:
As you can see, the regression line bows under the weight of the oppressive Democratic rule on the right side of the graph. (It's a little counter-intuitive to put the Democrats on the right side, but we'll cut GM University some slack).
This is related to my earlier post on the study about how Republicans are statistically happier than Democrats.
The Democrat states allow less freedom because the believe people are mindless idiots. Especially in rural areas. They also presuppose that everyone is very moral so they generally believe moral vices should not be prosecuted.
(There's also another study showing Republicans are more educated than Democrats. I find this funny because Democrats think professors should make all the policy, but the Republicans are more educated.)
posted by Matthew Canonicus at
6:12 PM
5 Comments:
An interesting experiment. I'm not going to comment on the content, its results, or your interpretation because the conversation would probably play out exactly like it did last time. However, I looked through the pdf and couldn't find any testing of whether the variation was statistically significant. I mean variables like the standard error, the t-ratios, the R^2 coefficient, tests for heteroscedasticity, and all the other meaty statistics jargon. The things that test whether there's a significant causal relationship between the two variables. Maybe it's there and I just missed it, so correct me if i'm wrong.
The reason i'm mentioning this is because i've done/doing quite a bit of econometrics at uni (economical statistics), and it'd be good practice for me to analyse models like this.
Another interesting note is that they seem to calculate a state's "freedom" on variables that go beyond party affiliation. Whereas democrats favour economic controls and social freedoms, republicans want economic freedom and social controls. The states that have more freedoms are also the kind of states that legalise gay marriage, abortion, drugs, and regulate youth access to tobacco/alcohol. All of which i'm guessing conservative earnest would not be in favour of.
Hi Tim,
Margin of statistical error is a function of sample size. As you can see by the individual points plotted on the graph, the sample size is 50 (actually I only counted 46).
Probably a better metric on a graph than sample size is the correlation coeffecient, which is basically a measure of how far the points are from the regression line.
The best "eyeball" way to look at that is to examine the points and ask yourself how consistently they dip lower on the right hand side of the graph. I personally think it is fairly consistent.
Republicans tend to oppose a couple "social freedoms": namely incentivizing homosexuality and killing babies. The abortion "freedom" is not a negative freedom in the sense of a freedom that does not infringe on the freedom of someone else (the baby), so I think that is a stretch to call the pro-abortion view "freedom" (it's a 'freedom' in the same sense that Cuba freely gives health care to it's citizens).
As for the homosexuality debate, I think the government should keep it's nose out. People are already "free" to practice homosexuality, but now they want legal accolades and incentives. I'm not sure how that is freedom. If the government stopped legalizing heterosexual marriage, it wouldn't harm the heterosexual marriages out there as much as it would undermine the government itself.
Oh, I just realized:
If every state is represented on the graph (and I think it is), then there is zero margin of statistical error because it is not a sampling. The statistics are based on the entire population, all 50 states.
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