Stephanie Riegel wrote an article in the Advocate a few days ago asking if the mega-projects that have been announced in our state will measurably alter the economy. It is a valid question, but one that deserves another look from a different angle. That contra-view must be what would the state’s future look like if we had ignored the steps needed to attract these projects and they had gone somewhere else?

Our state is extraordinarily rich in economic assets, yet our dependency on a hundred-year-old populist philosophy has kept us at the bottom of so many measures while so many other less well-endowed southern states have prospered. So, the answer to my question is really straight forward. If we had just clung to the belief that our culture was more important than our prosperity and if we had gone along with the Not In My Backyard gang, then we would have had no chance to alter our fate as we stayed mired in the muck at the bottom of the southern economic boom. That scenario would have continued us on our trajectory toward growing poverty, social ills, declining cities, and out-migration.

By following the governor’s lead and grasping the opportunities presented by these projects we have the opportunity to finally break the spell of Huey Long and to start down the path to the prosperity that our assets present to us.

One more critical thing that Stephanie touched on, the ultimate magnitude of our success will be measured by how well we capitalize on the seeds that have been planted by the private investments that we have attracted. We must dramatically change the tax policies and laws of the state and the policies of our cities so that we can attract the support businesses and cultivate the spinoffs that could come from these mega-projects. Failure to undertake those reforms will prevent us from achieving the full benefit of what our efforts promise.

We have been thrown a lifeline; it will be written in future history whether we were courageous enough to take advantage of it.