What is the freest place? Where can someone go in order to gain a high degree of freedom and economic prosperity?
Schools are labour camps.
The Heritage foundation's Index is for Economic Freedom. Not total freedom. We need social freedom as well. By this index a country could score 100 but execute J-walkers.
The question then becomes: what kind of freedom are you looking for?
http://www.johnuseed.com/?p=55#more-55 has some info about a UN human development report from 1991 which put the US in 13th. A college student rescored us pre 9/11 and gave us 23/40 although I believe they are scoring it differently from the original report. Some else also on everything2.com concluded the US was much lower but didn't score his.
The original report scores the questions (link above) as follows:
“The subindices of the Humana index are arranged into five groups of rights or freedoms:
(1) six questions on rights, or "freedoms to";
(2) 12 on "freedoms from";
(3) ten on "freedoms for";
(4) seven on legal rights; and
(5) five on personal rights.
The performance of each country is on a scale from zero (no rights) to three (guaranteed rights). These score are then aggregated. The evaluation is that of the author, however.
Seven "freedoms from." relating to respect for the personal integrity of the individual, are weighted at three times those of the rest. Thus, the maximum possible score a country can receive is 162 (33x3 + 7x3x3). Each country’s score out of 162 is converted to a percentage, to give its final human right score.”