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In an interview with Fox Business Network's Maria Baritormo in Davos, U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry said the U.S. is now the world's top oil and gas producing nation. "The U.S. is not just exporting energy, we're exporting freedom."

“We’re exporting to our allies in Europe the opportunity to truly have a choice of where do you buy your energy from. That’s freedom. And that kind of freedom is priceless.”

"There's no strings attached when you buy American LNG," Perry added. 

This is an important point, and we couldn't agree more

With tax reform having just become law, economists are trying to project the effects on the U.S. economy. Such calculation in a highly complex, dynamic economy is at least as much art as science but one trend seems clear -- the job market will continue to tighten. Some economists are predicting that unemployment will drop to 3%, nearly matching the lowest average unemployment rate on record (2.93% in 1953). But there are jobs and then there are good jobs—which will these new jobs be? A study by NDP Analytics provides some insight. It’s the intellectual property-intensive industries that will be driving the growth and creating the types of jobs and careers that people want.

I’ve done a lot of work on the role of intellectual property in trade agreements, so when nuttiness makes its way into the mainstream, I tend to notice.

If you’re interested in some of the work I’ve done on IP and trade, here’s a little:

• In 2014, during the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) discussions, I spoke as a panelist at a Cato Institute event. The panel was pretty much stacked 3:1 against me, and I think I held my own pretty well. It’s one of the more fun things I’ve done in policy in the last couple of years.
• Why Intellectual Property Should be Included in Trade Agreements

Anyway, recently, the anti-copyright coalition Re:Create’s Executive Director Josh Lamel wrote an op-ed in “The Hill” claiming creative industry calls for modern, strong copyright provisions in NAFTA that reflect lessons learned about internet ills since the DMCA was enacted in 1998 “would cripple the creative economy and the internet economies.”

To support his bizarre and counterintuitive assertions, Lamel relies on dubious claims and ends-driven research. To help everyone see through Re:Create’s artifice, I set the record straight below.

On Dallas-Fort Worth’s NBC 5 Lone Star Politics, Dr. Merrill Matthews reacts to the back and forth in Congress over health insurance subsidies and Medicaid block grants to the states in the latest effort to repeal Obamacare. Matthews also discusses what a workable health care reform plan would look like in Texas. Video begins at 11:24. 

After sending out my 29 tweets on local control, which were all theory, I sent out these 14 specific implications of coming to understand that local control is a false doctrine:

That was all theory. Now, implications (1/14) #txlege

The state can limit the ability of municipalities to tax, including property taxes and sales taxes (2/14) #txlege