The fine folks at Cato have put together an interactive feature showing the economic freedom of the entire world over time since 1975. They forgot to create an animated version of it, so we did:

It could be said that the entire world is getting freer and that shows in a dramatic improvement in the quality of life. Free-market capitalism has lifted over a billion people out of poverty in this time span.

Some countries (Venezuela) have failed to get the memo on freedom and have gone against the rest of its neighbors, standing out as one of the least free in the world. The United States is quite free still be being overshadowed by its neighbor to the North, Canada, and is heading in the wrong direction since the Bush/Obama debacles.