Landry address brings welcome new tone, ideas
Blog: Between The Lines
What a breath of fresh air Republican Gov. Jeff Landry brought
to Louisiana with his first State of the State Address.
Over the past eight years, Democrat former Gov.
John Bel Edwards used these annual opportunities to harangue Louisianans,
telling them through a litany of bad policy preferences drawing his rhetorical
support that they had to shape up by doing this, that, or the other – and
whatever these things were, they were not appealing to our better instincts,
but delivered as orders from an overseer to his chattel with government-centric
options leading the way. Orwellian language abounded, with tax increases termed
as "revenue enhancements," increased spending as "investments," and depopulation,
declining job numbers, and more able-bodied adults sitting out the labor force as
markers of economic success.
By great contrast, Landry's maiden address
discussed how government was to facilitate individuals' abilities to enrich their
life prospects by reserving its activities to its proper sphere. While he didn't
go into details, he drew upon a governing philosophy alien to the liberal
populism of Edwards and his predecessors spanning nearly a previous century – keeping
the citizenry safe from deviant human behavior and the vagaries of nature (by
using evidence-based approaches), building and maintaining cost-effective and
value-driven infrastructure, providing economic incentives that lead to people making
choices for productive behavior that contributes to improving society's overall
well-being, and limiting redistribution of what government takes from producers
only to those whose physical circumstances or paucity of innate abilities or
whom have suffered genuine bad luck, who cannot contribute in that fashion.
Preferring to draw upon broader themes with strategic
use of data to support his views, he drew attention to three policy areas, all
of which exemplified his approach that in policy-making government should
empower people by not empowering itself. In elementary and secondary education,
which he identified as the prequel to economic improvement, noting how the
state ranks lowly (among the
bottom ten) while spending
more per pupil than many states, he advocated for a diminution of the
government monopoly model that narrows families' educational options, constrains
teachers, and encourages faddish orthodoxies at the expense of real learning.
He backed education savings accounts, where money follows the student, and
enhancing choice as the means by which to accomplish this transformation.
Landry also commented upon the state's stifling
approach to occupational licensing, calling upon streamlining and jettisoning unnecessary
rules. The state regulates
more jobs than any other state (as well as making it difficult to transfer
licenses from elsewhere) and according to one watchdog organization in overall
terms ranks sixth most onerous. And, he emphasized that the state's property
insurance struggles could be solved through lifting unnecessarily burdensome regulation.
However, Landry sees the degree of corrective
state policy as beyond statute. In addition to these policy preferences, he
also called upon the Legislature to establish parameters for a constitutional
convention next year, a document he sees as too protective of certain special interests
that needlessly complicates and constricts governing.
As well, Landry noted how some quarters – read leftists
and Democrats whose rearguard actions over the past two decades to preserve
liberal populism in governance have been breached in 2024's first two months with
the crevasse ever widening – complained that his policy changes, by executive
action and legislative agreement, supposedly moved too quickly, to which he had
an answer: when so far behind (implying that these forces had caused that), you
had to run faster to catch up.
Landry appears to have recognized from the moment
of his early general election win two important things about executive success:
move quickly and use a big majority, which he had at the polls and has in the
Legislature, to make big changes. Whatever momentum loss he may have experienced
from the first reapportionment special session that disgruntled some of his GOP
legislative allies by having to inflict a partisan loss upon their party, he
regained quickly in the second special session focusing on crime solutions. His
address presaged more big moves to come, and more heartburn for his ideological
opponents.
