Carolina Journal Radio No. 818: Familiar faces will lead N.C. General Assembly in 2019

State senators have elected Republican Phil Berger to a fifth consecutive term as the Senate’s top officer. The state House has elected Republican Tim Moore to a third term as House speaker. Rick Henderson, Carolina Journal editor-in-chief, discusses the potential impact of these leadership elections on the next two years of state legislative action, including relations with Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper. Some governments use selective taxes to fund public pension liabilities. This creates potential problems, as professor Thad Calabrese of New York University documents in the recent book For Your Own Good. Calabrese outlined the potential problems during a recent panel discussion co-hosed by the John Locke Foundation. Voters decided last November that North Carolina should add a photo ID voting requirement to the state constitution. Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed the bill designed to meet that new constitutional requirement. You’ll hear highlights from the legislative debate before a vote to override Cooper’s veto. Partisans on both the left and right make mistakes when they discuss government and its role in both causing and responding to economic inequality. That’s one of the key points of a recent book, The Captured Economy. Co-author Steven Teles, a Johns Hopkins University political scientist, shared major themes from the book during a recent lecture at Duke University. Trump administration efforts to roll back federal regulations are being counteracted to some extent by the so-called ESG movement. The movement involves basing investment decisions on environmental, social, and governance criteria – rather than the traditional goal of maximizing returns. Donald van der Vaart, John Locke Foundation senior fellow, assesses the ESG movement’s impact.