Before continuing my review of Schneider’s book, let me make one additional comment on a point I made in my first post. Use of catch-phrases like “capitalism” are often not very helpful because they are used in confusing ways by numerous disparate groups. At the same time, relative freedom from government officials pilfering your resources is to be considered a good thing. Economic liberty is the basic, foundational liberty, and so we should never assume we have arrived, and we always want to be pushing in the right direction.
With that in mind, here are a couple of links that are helpful in seeing the big picture — here and here.
At the same time, I would prefer a simpler method of evaluating governments than this, which is the one I mentioned earlier. Say that a nation’s government expenditures were 1X and their GNP was 10X. Their freedom ratio would be 1/10. If it were 9/10, we would have to call it their lack of freedom ratio, but you get the point. And if it were above a certain ratio (to be determined) then it wouldn’t really be capitalist in any meaningful sense, no matter how much people whooped and hollered for it.
However helpful the above links were, it still seems to me that there is too much room for self-serving maneuvering in the handling of too many statistics. Overall budgets and GNP are not hard to obtain, and a simple math problem would tell us what the deal was.
This is also related to the point that government expenditures are the issue, not the number of regulations that exist on paper. Nothing is enforced without money, and when the money is the government’s hands, something is being enforced, and somebody’s freedom is being restricted.