LANSING, Mich. (Michigan News Source) – A recent study published by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy shows that Michigan’s performance in its ranking of economic freedom in the United States rates very poor.

Out of 383 Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs), the highest ranking in Michigan was Midland which came in at an embarrassing 193rd place. The worse place in Michigan was Bay City which was near the end at 346th place.

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To measure our economic freedom, Dean Stansel, Ph.D and economist at the Bridwell Institute for Economic Freedom in SMU’s Cox School of Business in Dallas, built an index of three major policy areas – taxation, government spending and labor market regulation. Each area also had a subcategory of relevant data including income and payroll taxes, expenditures by the government and government employment.

The information gathered was from data used through 2017 which is the most recently available data produced by the federal government. The feds are currently conducting their newest survey of 90K governments but there is a two-year time delay before data is accessible.

The computer model used by Stansel gave each MSA an objective score based on the collected data and Michigan’s freedom score across all three categories was only 6.24 out of 10. The national average was 8% higher at 6.75.

Other findings reported by the study show that Michigan’s 14 MSAs which were looked at exceeded the national average in their unemployment rate with only four who had rates below the country’s average and only three Michigan MSA’s had employment growth above the national average from 2017 to 2019. Six of the Michigan’s MSA’s lost jobs during that period.

The study also shows that only the Grand Rapids MSA saw population growth that exceeded the national average from 2017 to 2019 and it was also pointed out that the Census Bureau reported this year that Michigan is losing population.

Michigan News Source reached out to Michael D. LaFaive, Senior Director of the Morey Fiscal Policy Initiative at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, an co-author of “Economic Freedom in Michigan and the United States” to ask why he considers the free market to be important to the average person’s daily life.

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He responded, “No other system has been shown to have such a positive impact on the many measures of well being people claim to care about. We measured economic freedom at the MSA level and looked for correlations between economic freedom and things like employment growth and population changes as well as employment rates.

The MSAs with the best freedom scores in our ranking performed much better than those in the lowest.” He continued, “Related, academics have used data like we’ve produced in the past and, after controlling for other economic phenomena, found a link between economic freedom scores and interstate migration.”

When asked about solutions to making Michigan a more attractive, free-market state, LaFaive said, “Restraint to start. Policymakers should take an economic Hippocratic Oath and first do no harm. Restraint is key. Then they should consider policies that would raise their scores in our index. Cut the personal income tax, local property taxes,
and spending while restraining growth in the size of government bureaucracies.”

Adam Smith, author of “Wealth of Nations” wrote about rejecting government interference in market activities back in 1776, during the official beginning of our nation. He wrote, “To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers…The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from
this order, ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an
interest to deceive and even oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.