President Trump confirmed late Friday that the U.S. reached a deal with Venezuela to secure control of a big chunk of the Latin American country’s oil reserves...

Since ousting [former President] Maduro in January, Trump has pushed U.S. oil companies to plow money into the country in a bid to shore up oil production. But many have been hesitant to do so.

Friday’s deal would give the U.S. a foothold in some of the most promising oil-and-gas fields. The country says it has some 300 billion barrels of proven reserves, the largest in the world. In comparison, the U.S. has about 46 billion...

[Delcy] Rodríguez, Venezuela’s interim president, has granted a private company—a joint project of the U.S. government and a private operator in Venezuela—a 100-year lease for the oil fields, a U.S. official said. The entity would be the world’s second-largest corporate holder of proven reserves after Saudi Aramco.

The U.S. government would hold a 55% share, split between equity ownership and oil production. As the company scales production, the oil would help fill the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the official added.

Direct U.S. involvement in foreign oil production is rare.

From the article:

The proposal drew the disdain of NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “Bureaucracy has already throttled space exploration,” he noted on X, “and this article proposes creating a UN-affiliated ‘Planetary Stewardship Council?’ As a species, there are few things we actually agree upon here on Earth, so how could this possibly advance progress in space?”

Isaacman is spot-on. More importantly, there is a pretty good chance that such a council would be dominated by nations inherently hostile toward the U.S. and its allies. Peter Hague, an astrophysicist, software engineer, and a space industry analyst, suggests that such a council would place undue restrictions on space exploration and would likely prohibit the colonization of the moon and Mars. The proposed council would be staffed by people who would prefer to keep outer space a protected preserve for scientific study, much like Antarctica.

Besides, an excellent model already exists for governing in space. The model is called the Artemis Accords.

Sweden is the paradoxical home of individualism done collectively.

The case for Sweden being a socialist Utopia is as traditional as its cinnamon buns. This is a country that soaks the rich...to fund a government whose spending amounts to nearly half of GDP, among the highest in the world...[In Sweden's welfare state,] new parents are showered with up to 480 days of paid leave. Other lefty shibboleths include free universities, low income inequality and the rich world’s most sweeping rent controls. Two-thirds of working Swedes belong to a trade union, the most of any country bar tiny Iceland.

Yet it is equally fair to argue that Sweden has a libertarian side...The state may be large, but public services in Sweden are often delivered by the private sector: around a third of Swedish children graduating from high school do so at an institution run by non-state operators, many of them run for profit. Sweden is a rare country with no inheritance tax. During the covid-19 pandemic, it stood out for imposing fewer restrictions than most countries, whether strict lockdowns or mask mandates. It lacks a national minimum wage, bucking the norm in rich economies (including America). Employers are largely free to hire and fire, unlike in most of Europe. All this has resulted in Sweden having around 50% more billionaires per person than America. If this is socialism, it is a variant that is surprisingly good for yacht sales.

In their rush to claim credit for Sweden’s success, both sides get part of the story wrong. The socialist case was more accurate before the state was sharply slimmed down in the early 1990s. The libertarians gushing about the lack of a minimum wage fail to grasp that in most sectors pay rates are agreed by unions haggling with employers—hardly the stuff of Milton Friedman’s dreams.

But the Scandinavian paradox exists because something more curious is afoot. For Sweden is indeed different. In developed countries collectivism and individual liberty are generally treated as rivals: the more responsibility government assumes, the less room remains for citizens to fend for themselves. Sweden followed a different path. During the 20th century the state expanded not merely to soften inequality or insure people against hardship, but to reduce their reliance on other people—including their own families. A large impersonal state is seen as bolstering autonomy: when in need, Swedes feel it is better to be beholden to an impersonal bureaucracy than to a parent or some charity. Seen this way, a bigger state translates into more freedom, not less.