The other blessings of economic freedom: If you just read my post right below this one, you might say to yourself that, ok economically free countries are rich, but they are both unequal and indifferent to the welfare of others. Wrong on both accounts: using the same sample I just described, I found that economic freedom is positively related to a willingness to help others (.57) and basically unrelated to income inequality (-.14). Evidently, markets create wealth, they distribute it broadly, and the wealth they create gives people the luxury to worry about the well-being of others.

Freedom and national wealth are empirically indistinguisable: Continuing my exploration of cross-national data, I noticed an extraordinarily large correlation between economic freedom and per capita GDP. Sample size was between 30 and 40, and the measures were normally distributed. The Pearson correlation was almost .90. Translation: national wealth and market freedom are almost empirically indistinguishable here. Where you have one, you will have the other.