Tea Party Palatine

http://mercatus.org/freedom-50-states-2011/IL

Illinois is one of the worst states to live in from a personal-freedom perspective, but on economic freedom it is in the middle of the pack. Illinois has the fifth-harshest gun-control laws in the country, after California, Maryland, New York, and Massachusetts, and the state’s victimless-crimes arrest rates are almost unfathomable. In 2008, more than 2 percent of the state’s population was arrested for a victimless crime (and that figure does not count people under 18), and the vast majority of these arrests were for drugs. Illinois’s drug law-enforcement rate is by far the worst in the country at more than three standard deviations worse than average. Asset-forfeiture laws are also among the worst in the nation. On the plus side, Illinois’s homeschool regulations are effectively as minimal as Idaho’s, a case of benign neglect it seems. Since 2007, smoking bans have come in with a vengeance. Illinois is in the middle of the pack on most economic issues, but could certainly stand to relax its labor laws, improve the court system, and expand eminent-domain reforms.