The Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal have released their 2006 Index of Economic Freedom , which doesn’t contain a lot of surprises. One thing I did notice, though, was that despite the political focus of the Journal’s op-ed on the index, the 25 countries listed as “Free” were almost all either from the Anglosphere, the Germanosphere, or Scandinavia, suggesting that cultural context plays a bigger role in economic freedom than some would like to admit.