Week in Review: Landmark Win in Louisiana

Louisianans have had it rough—at least when it comes to grappling with the government for the freedom to work. But this week, Governor Jeff Landry delivered good news for his state when he signed Goldwater’s landmark legislation to universally recognize out-of-state occupational licenses for new workers in Louisiana.

Modeled after Goldwater’s Breaking Down Barriers to Work Act, Louisiana’s reform is one of the broadest in the country, impacting dozens of professions. The state joins dozens of others in adopting Goldwater’s reform and allowing countless Americans to get to work without having to beg the government for permission.

Read more here.

Cheaper than Public Schools

Who would support a program that “price-gouges” families and spends more than a billion dollars of Arizona taxpayer money every year by subsidizing the education of wealthy families at an inflated cost per student? For those eager to condemn Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program, there’s just one problem.

The scheme described above isn’t Arizona’s ESA program. It’s the state’s public school system. And, in fact, Arizona’s ESA program is successfully delivering educational opportunity to students of all backgrounds at a far lower cost per student than the traditional public school system. Goldwater’s Matt Beienburg writes about it in a new op-ed.

Read about it here. 

Government Bullying and the First Amendment

The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously held this week that the National Rifle Association (NRA) can proceed in its lawsuit against New York bureaucrats who tried use their regulatory powers over banks to intimidate them into cutting financial ties with the NRA—out of their disagreement with the NRA’s beliefs.

As the Goldwater Institute argued in the brief we filed, today’s pervasive regulatory state makes this a particularly serious threat: it enables bureaucrats to pressure private businesses in ways that violate the Constitution—and government officials are sometimes quite proud of the fact. Timothy Sandefur, Goldwater Vice President for Legal Affairs, analyzes the ruling at In Defense of Liberty.

Read more here.