Last revised 14 June 2007
The following questions are treated as if asked of Paul Bonneau, WLI founder.
What is a "Liberty Index"?
What exactly does this Liberty Index measure?
Is the Index an exact measure?
Where did your idea for this Liberty Index come from?
Your Index does not look like the RLC one; why not?
Why don't you show the legislators' scores, as well as their ranking?
What are your political biases?
You're not from Wyoming. What would you know about Wyoming issues?
You're not from Wyoming. Why should we trust you?
How well is the Wyoming legislature supporting freedom?
You call the legislators at the bottom of the chart “The Dirty Dozen”. Isn't that going overboard?
Which major party, Democrat or Republican, better supports liberty?
Why did you worry about introduced bills? Many of them never reached the floor for a vote.
What can I do with this information?
What is a “Liberty Index”? A Liberty Index is much like other measures of members in the legislature, this particular one seeking to determine how much they support liberty. There are many other Indexes, or measures, for various issues such as firearms rights or gun control, abortion, support for labor, support for business, and so forth. These Indexes seek to distill many complex bits of information down to a concise, useful result accessible to voters who don't have the time to do the research themselves. Thus they perform a service to the curious voter, and also give “how'm I doing” feedback to the legislator. They may also be of use to a challenger candidate if the legislator in question is straying far afield from what his constituents would appreciate.
What exactly does this Liberty Index measure? It measures the tendency of Wyoming state legislators to consider and support liberty in the votes they make and in the bills they sponsor. By liberty we mean the classical definition, illustrated by this quote from Thomas Jefferson: Of liberty I would say that, in the whole plenitude of its extent, it is unobstructed action according to our will. But rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law,' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual. In other words, the ability of citizens to live their life without interference from the government, other than that legitimately needed to prevent them interfering with others. A more detailed description of what I consider to be liberty may be found here. Also, a forum has been created for anyone wishing to discuss this issue; I am interested in your feedback on it.
Is the Index an exact measure? No. Like any Index, there is a lot of judgment involved in rating the bills on which the Index depends. There may be differences of opinion on how a bill affects liberty, or it may affect it in conflicting ways. See the discussion on methodology for information on the reliability of this Index. The bottom line here is that, considering two legislators in the Index, it can only reliably be said one supports liberty more than the other if there is a substantial difference in their position in the ranking. If they are nearby, it usually cannot be said for sure. That is, legislator A at position 5 is not necessarily more liberty-friendly than legislator B at position 8; but they are both clearly more liberty-friendly than legislator C at position 30.
Where did your idea for this Liberty Index come from? It was inspired by the work done by Clifford Thies, for the Republican Liberty Caucus. He has for years been ranking the members of Congress. The Wyoming Congressional delegation typically does very well in his rankings, by the way.
I also learned about using spreadsheets to create rankings from diverse pieces of information while working as a researcher for the Free State Project, where I helped develop one for their state selection process. FSP members placed Wyoming second after New Hampshire in their vote, but Wyoming in the opinion of most researchers ranked highest in the nation in support for freedom, according to our spreadsheet. That's what first got me interested in Wyoming.
Your Index does not look like the RLC one; why not? See the discussion on methodology. I wanted a straightforward result with an obvious interpretation, not the unnecessarily complex chart that Thies uses. The idea is to provide a service to voters, not to make them expend a lot of effort to no good end. There is also a problem making a distinction between personal and economic freedom, as Thies attempts to do; many bills affect both.
Why don't you show the legislators' scores, as well as their ranking? The score for a particular legislator is the sum of his weighted vote for all the bills. A bill's weight is positive if liberty-enhancing, negative if liberty-harming. After all the scores are tallied, the legislators are sorted (or “ranked”) according to their score in the spreadsheet. I decided to leave the score out of the final report because it is somewhat extraneous, complicates the Index, and might give the erroneous impression that the Index is an exact, rather than an approximate, measure. What I really want people to take from this is whether their legislator is near the top of the chart (relatively liberty-supporting) or near the bottom (relatively liberty-hostile). Ranking, without including the scores, is good enough for that. For anyone curious about scores, they may be found in the spreadsheets.
What are your political biases? See my background to get an idea. I don't think the definition of liberty that we get from Jefferson (above) allows a partisan interpretation. The attempt certainly is to be nonpartisan in this Index (indeed, the methodology used eliminates the most likely possible source of partisanship - we rate bills without knowing who sponsored them or voted for them). If someone from the other major party (or any party) wants to help with the Index, and he or she truly supports liberty, I will certainly welcome them.
However I should add to this, that there have been attempts to redefine the concept of liberty itself, turning it into something Jefferson would not have recognized. Friedrich Hayek, in his book The Road to Serfdom noted and explained these attempts. The Wyoming Liberty Index uses the classical, Jeffersonian definition of freedom.
You're not from Wyoming. What would you know about Wyoming issues? Actually, quite a lot, since I have been studying Wyoming for a couple of years now, and read most bills in the legislature starting in 2003, including whatever background info I could find on them. The standard for liberty is pretty much universal, anyway. It's usually not hard to tell if a bill harms or helps liberty, no matter what legislature it is being considered in. For those bills we do have a hard time with, we simply do not rate them so they don't contribute to the legislators' scores.
Besides, no one in Wyoming is doing this kind of work. Update: This is no longer so. Michael Hendricks, a Wyoming resident, is doing this work - for the Wyoming Liberty Index. And Paul Bonneau now lives in Wyoming. See contacts page.
I'd like to address one additional point on this topic. It is a commonplace fallacy that "immigrants want to change the state into the same thing they were escaping from." While there may be some immigrants like that, most come to Wyoming because of what the state is. The last thing they want to do is change it; more likely they want to resist change. In our particular example, we would be rating highest, the legislator who voted no on every bill (see comments below). That is an example of resisting change. It is not immigrants who are pushing Wyoming in the direction of California; it is the good old boys in the legislature, often born and raised in Wyoming. They do it not because they like California, but because they like to rule, the same thing that motivates California legislators.
You're not from Wyoming. Why should we trust you? I will be from Wyoming soon, probably some time in 2006. (Update: Now a resident.) Then I will be like 57% of the people in Wyoming, an immigrant to the state. Anyway, there is no need to trust us. The spreadsheets are available to all, so anyone may rate the bills themselves. Even if one disagrees with the ratings we have made on a few particular bills (and all of our bill raters have had some differences of opinion), if one care about liberty, an outcome very similar to ours will result.
Anyone who wishes to publish an index based on a modified spreadsheet, however, must contact me (Paul Bonneau) to get my permission; which I will give to anyone who cites the Wyoming Liberty Index web site, and whose modification could reasonably be interpreted as one consistent with the classical definition of liberty.
How well is the Wyoming legislature supporting freedom? Not very well. While Wyoming is hardly California, we see the same trends in government as in California: increasing regulation and control of citizen's lives. The losses are not in big chunks, but you might say liberty is dying the "death by 1000 cuts". Each assault is so small that few show up on our radar screens, but the cumulative effect is bad, and definitely in the wrong direction. There are far too many legislators in Wyoming who would be tossed from office if their constituents knew what they were up to. That is one of the purposes of the Liberty Index: to let people know who the bad apples are.
You call the legislators at the bottom of the chart “The Dirty Dozen”. Isn't that going overboard? Perhaps it is. I do have some reservations about being so blunt. Yet these legislators have a responsibility to respect the constitution they swore to uphold, and protect the freedom of their constituents; and those at the bottom are clearly failing in that important duty. One wonders what a Patrick Henry or a Samuel Adams would have thought of them—would they consider the term “Dirty Dozen” too blunt? Such persons don't deserve to be governing a state whose citizens are so freedom-supporting, as Wyoming's generally are.
Which major party, Democrat or Republican, better supports liberty? The results are mixed. Both parties are represented at the top of the chart, and both are represented at the bottom. If you care about liberty, you cannot mindlessly vote for one party and expect to be supporting freedom that way! Now, you may believe the average individual in your party better supports liberty than the average individual in the other party; in fact, it may be so. But that does not imply that those who represent you support liberty, even if they are in your party. It cannot be emphasized enough, that straight party-line voting does not support liberty. You have to understand the candidate's true, not advertized, positions. The Wyoming Liberty Index should be able to help with that, at least for candidates who have a record. That's our mission.
Why did you worry about introduced bills? Many of them never reached the floor for a vote. I decided to include these when I found how strong the preponderance of liberty-harming bills was, compared to liberty-enhancing bills. In fact it was so strong that I decided to add to the spreadsheet an imaginary representative who simply, mindlessly voted no on all bills; and another who voted yes on all bills. The imaginary yes voter always ends up in the bottom of the pack. The imaginary no voter always obtains a score far better than any legislator gets! That is, if citizens just elected someone who promised to vote no on every bill (and he or she actually delivered on that promise), they would be helping liberty tremendously!
What that told me was that there was no balance in the bills introduced. Someone was loading up the committees with liberty-harming bills, and I decided it was worth finding out who, and dinging them for it.
What can I do with this information? If your legislator is near the top of the chart, thank him, and support his candidacy. Tell him you became aware of his liberty-supporting record from the Wyoming Liberty Index.
If your legislator was in the middle range (which in this case, means harming liberty substantially since the average was so bad), I'd call him up, and ask, "Why?" Tell him you expect liberty to be the highest priority when deciding what to do with these bills, not the lowest. You might even ask him if he knows what liberty is.
If your legislator is at the bottom of the chart, it would be a good idea to find and support a candidate who would be willing to run against him in the next election. There is no excuse for people in a state like Wyoming, to be represented by politicians with such disdain for freedom. Please feel free to use the legislator's poor performance in the Index as a campaign issue.