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.
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