Who’s to blame for Louisiana being in the state it’s in?
In an age when finger-pointing is all the rage, who can we tear into for our state trolling the bottom in all the good listicles while pushing for No. 1 in the bad ones?
If transferral of blame is America’s favorite pastime, as former LSU baseball legend Skip Bertman once said, then who among our confederacy of dunces should be shamed for this, Business Report Executive Editor JR Ball asks in his new opinion piece.
Seriously, why is a state so rich in natural resources so pathetic in pretty much everything else? The numbers don’t lie. According to U.S. News & World Report’s 2021 Best States Rankings, determined by weighted evaluations of 71 metrics across eight categories, Louisiana is dead last among the 50 states.
Now, back to who can we eviscerate. Remember Huey Long, the populist governor, who launched his political career by waging war on the big oil companies? The boisterous, every-man-a-king, quasi-socialist declared in 1929 that he’d rather suffer “a thousand impeachments” than “not dare to call the Standard Oil Company [now ExxonMobil] to account.”
Perhaps, but just five years later, while he was a senator, Long and his political cronies had the chutzpah to form a company that bought up state mineral leases and resold them to oil companies at an eye-popping profit—keeping a tidy sum for themselves.
The reliance on oil and gas that Long left behind didn’t create Louisiana’s problems, but our willingness to trade an agricultural plantation culture for an oil and gas culture has made it impossible to adapt to an evolving economy. As bad, when the money was rolling into state and local government coffers, none of it was saved for investments or rainy days. Instead, we cut taxes.
Efforts to diversify the Louisiana economy have been ineffective. Meanwhile, places like northern Virginia built tech corridors, attracting more than a dozen Fortune 500 companies and a massive Amazon corporate complex.
Our leaders need to focus on the titanic shift that’s urgently necessary, rather than making it easier to own a gun, harder to vote or demanding that we teach our children the “good stuff” about slavery—as well as “the bad and the ugly.”
If we don’t end this curse, then Louisiana will forever remain the banana republic that it’s been ever since that infamous day in 1901 when a farmer near Jennings discovered oil in his rice field.
Read Ball’s full column from the latest edition of Business Report. Send comments to Editor@businessreport.com.
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May 10, 2021 at 09:20PM
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JR Ball: Louisiana's curse of abundant resources - Greater Baton Rouge Business Report
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