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This is from a study done by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University by William P Ruger ( love that last name!) and Jason Sorens
Freedom in the 50 states
An index of personal and economic freedom
This an brief extract. Fascinating read.
Happy Birthday America!

Executive Summary
This paper presents the first-ever comprehensive ranking of the American states
on their public policies affecting individual freedoms in the economic, social, and
personal spheres.

We develop and justify our ratings and aggregation procedure on
explicitly normative criteria, defining individual freedom as the ability to dispose of
one's own life, liberty, and justly acquired property however one sees fit, so long as one
does not coercively infringe on another individual's ability to do the same.

This study improves on prior attempts to score economic freedom for American states
in three primary ways: (1) it includes measures of social and personal freedoms such
as peaceable citizens' rights to educate their own children, own and carry firearms,
and be free from unreasonable search and seizure; (2) it includes far more variables,
even on economic policies alone, than prior studies, and there are no missing data on
any variable; and (3) it uses new, more accurate measurements of key variables, particularly
state fiscal policies.

We find that the freest states in the country are New Hampshire, Colorado, and South
Dakota, which together achieve a virtual tie for first place. All three states feature low
taxes and government spending and middling levels of regulation and paternalism.

New York is the least free by a considerable margin, followed by New Jersey, Rhode
Island, California, and Maryland.

On personal freedom alone, Alaska is the clear winner,
while Maryland brings up the rear. As for freedom in the different regions of the
country, the Mountain and West North Central regions are the freest overall while the
Middle Atlantic lags far behind on both economic and personal freedom.

Regression analysis demonstrates that states enjoying
more economic and personal freedom tend
to attract substantially higher rates of internal net migration.
The data used to create the rankings are publicly available online at www.statepolicyindex.
com, and we invite others to adopt their own weights to see how the overall
state freedom rankings change.

Table V: Overall Freedom Ranking
State Overall Freedom
1. New Hampshire 0.432
2. Colorado 0.421
3. South Dakota 0.392
4. Idaho 0.356
5. Texas 0.346
6. Missouri 0.320
7. Tennessee 0.284
8. Arizona 0.279
9. Virginia 0.275
10. North Dakota 0.268
11. Utah 0.250
12. Kansas 0.210
13. Indiana 0.208
14. Michigan 0.206
15. Wyoming 0.193
16. Iowa 0.183
17. Georgia 0.146
18. Oklahoma 0.143
19. Montana 0.125
20. Pennsylvania 0.102
21. Alabama 0.092
22. Florida 0.068
23. North Carolina 0.019
24. Nevada 0.013
25. Mississippi -0.004
26. Delaware -0.008
27. Oregon -0.009
28. Nebraska -0.018
29. Arkansas -0.023
30. South Carolina -0.040
31. Alaska -0.071
32. Kentucky -0.082
33. West Virginia -0.097
34. Louisiana -0.110
35. Minnesota -0.111
36. New Mexico -0.150
37. Wisconsin -0.199
38. Ohio -0.205
39. Maine -0.214
40. Vermont -0.217
41. Connecticut -0.225
42. Illinois -0.238
43. Massachusetts -0.242
44. Washington -0.275
45. Hawaii -0.304
46. Maryland -0.405
47. California -0.413
48. Rhode Island -0.430
49. New Jersey -0.457
50. New York -0.784