One of the hottest sectors in the U.S. today is energy. The shale revolution brought to you by hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has produced a historic boom period in the oil and gas industry. Thousands of jobs are being created every month, regulations are coming down, the U.S. is not beholden to the Paris Accord any longer, and domestic output has topped 10 million barrels per day (bpd).

Every 10 years or so there is a banking crisis. We are due. However, the furthest thing from most people’s minds with the Trump boom is a banking/financial crisis, except for a few folks at the Brookings Institution, who just released a paper entitled “Liquidity Crisis in the Mortgage Market.”

In New Hampshire today, President Trump announced his plan for tackling the opioid crisis.  The main points from the plan, as reported by Axios, are:

More than 150 years after the Civil War, the nation is engulfed in controversy over statues of people who fought for the Confederacy. Many people want the statues taken down. The statues, they say, depict men who were slaveowners, slavery proponents, and traitors. Those who want the statues to stay in place are said to be racists. The feelings run so deep on both sides of the controversy that one would think that the Civil War ended just yesterday.

By many objective signs and indicators the world is becoming a far more materially comfortable place. Over the last thirty years, tens of millions of people have been raised out of poverty in various parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America. At the same time, new technologies have been transforming communications and conveniences of everyday life. Yet, present political trends in America and other places in the world seem to be suggesting a far different story.

Last week Matt Yglesias over at Vox tried his best to deflate the notion that America was becoming increasingly hostile to free speech. Unfortunately, as Daniel Bier over at Skeptical Libertarian noted, Yglesias’s own charts indicate that support for free speech among “Liberal” and “Slightly Liberal” Americans is at the lowest point in over 40 years. 

President Trump’s recent cabinet shake-up looks to be a real boost to hard-line militarism and neo-conservatism. If his nominees to head the State Department and CIA are confirmed, we may well have moved closer to war.

Before being chosen by Trump to head up the CIA, Secretary of State nominee Mike Pompeo was one of the most pro-war Members of Congress. He has been militantly hostile toward Iran, and many times has erroneously claimed that Iran is the world’s number one state sponsor of terror. The truth is, Iran neither attacks nor threatens the United States.

The Trump administration is continuing to raise eyebrows with its not-so-new approaches to longstanding problems. The most recent is the plan to “solve” the opioid epidemic by, among other things, introducing the death penalty in certain cases for drug dealers. While the death penalty may seem like a new tactic, it’s essentially just a continuation of the century-long pattern of the drug war: when the policies aren’t working, make them tougher.

The recent rioting and virtual civil war in Northern Ireland points out, both for libertarians and for the world at large, the vital importance of pushing for and attaining the goal of national liberation for all oppressed people. Aside from being a necessary condition to the achievement of justice, national liberation is the only solution to the great world problems of territorial disputes and oppressive national rule.

Cries for gun control have reached deafening levels since the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida on February 14th, 2018.

Exploiting the tragedy that left 17 people dead, gun control advocates are using every means possible to ram gun control measures across legislatures nationwide.