Our liberties have taken a beating in recent years, accelerated by governments' enthusiasm for leveraging COVID-19 as an excuse for further tightening control over society. We long ago arrived at the point where newly published assessments of the health of personal and economic freedom elicit winces before we even read the gloomy summaries. So the arrival of the latest edition of the Cato Institute's Freedom in the 50 States is welcome both for its somewhat optimistic take on the future of pandemic-fueled restrictions as well as for the handy guide it offers for people looking to relocate within the United States to places where valued freedoms enjoy protection.

First, let's get the inevitable pain out of the way: "[A]lthough the rights of some have increased significantly in certain areas, for the average American, freedom has declined generally because of federal policy that includes encroachment on policies that states controlled 20 years ago," concede authors William Ruger and Jason Sorens in the introduction to the print edition (PDF).

Dispiriting caveats are a feature of these assessments, from warnings in The Economist's Democracy Index 2020 that "democracy has not been in robust health for some time" and "[a]cross the world in 2020, citizens experienced the biggest rollback of individual freedoms ever undertaken by governments during peacetime (and perhaps even in wartime)" to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance's caution that "[t]he world is becoming more authoritarian as non-democratic regimes become even more brazen in their repression and many democratic governments suffer from backsliding by adopting their tactics of restricting free speech and weakening the rule of law, exacerbated by what threatens to become a 'new normal' of Covid-19 restrictions." It's wise to have a stiff drink when reading these reports. And remember that their rankings are relative to the moment.

That's especially true of Freedom in the 50 States since it grades the states in so many categories involving both personal and economic freedom. It then ranks them based on weights that necessarily are prone to vary depending on individual preferences and priorities.