FEE: I’m very excited and proud that a Lithuanian from the Lithuanian Free Market Institute has been chosen to be the new President of FEE, the Foundation for Economic Education. I first started getting FEE’s monthly journal when I was in high school. Check out Zilvinas Silenas’s innaugural speech below.
The Best of Reagan: This last week I attended Frontiers of Freedom’s Tribute to One of America’s Greatest Presidents, Ronald Reagan. They prepared a tribute video that is worth sharing.
Newsreel for This Week:
‘Medicare for all’ branding could be backfiring on liberals
Those who believe that the government should provide everybody with free healthcare have long struggled with a way to brand it.
Grassley announces opposition to key Trump proposal to lower drug prices
Grassley had long held his fire, saying he was waiting for the administration to formally propose a regulation. But on Wednesday, Grassley said he was not going to wait any longer.
3 Social Security Strategies That Might Fail You
If you’re entitled to benefits, you want to get the most out of them. But if you adopt these three strategies, you could end up losing out financially.
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-Saul Anuzis
MEGA MAGA: Donald Trump Raises $24 MILLION in First 24 HOURS of 2020 Campaign
President Trump shattered fundraising records less than 24 hours after officially announcing his 2020 campaign; taking in more than $24.8 million in the first day of his re-election run for the White House.
“@realDonaldTrump has raised a record breaking $24.8M in less than 24 hours for his re-election. The enthusiasm across the country for this …
Florida supporters on why they want Trump to win in 2020
On Tuesday night in Orlando, Florida, Donald Trump “officially” kicked off his presidential re-election bid.
Of course, everyone knew he was going to run for re-election. That was hardly a surprise. He filed his 2020 paperwork the day after his January 2017 inauguration, and he’s been holding regular campaign-style rallies across key battleground states ever since.
And so on Tuesday in Florida – one of the biggest of electoral battlegrounds, a state the president absolutely must win in 2020 – it wasn’t about whether Mr Trump was going to seek re-election. It was about how he’s going to do it. The event was an unveiling of sorts – a trial run of his pitch to the American people for four more years, before a raucous, red-hat-wearing crowd packing a 20,000-seat arena.
Trump rallies are always a give-and-take affair, with the president trying out lines to see how his supporters react. And the crowd’s response to Mr Trump’s 78-minute speech offered some clues of what could be in store.
There were the expected boasts about the state of the American economy, which he called “perhaps the greatest economy in the history of our country”. He talked about regulation-cutting, boosts in military spending, trade negotiations, tax reform, border security and judicial appointments. All received a warm reception from the audience.
LARA TRUMP: Families need 4 more years of President Trump
American families have come a long way since President Trump took office two-and-a-half years ago — but what happens to them in the future entirely depends on how we vote in the next presidential election.
My father-in-law will announce his re-election bid from Orlando, Fla., on Tuesday. It will be an important and powerful milestone for the president, but, more importantly, it will be a defining moment for American families, many who struggled to get by financially throughout the decade before he took office in 2016.
As the president makes his announcement, that struggle won’t be far from his mind — he continues to fight for those families and deliver economic results for them that the Democrats said were no longer possible.
The fact is, the Trump administration is doing more to strengthen American families now than any administration in recent memory was able to do — or tried to do, for that matter. And should President Trump lose the White House, households across this great country will lose the gains they have made under his administration.
The ‘blue wall’ is real; GOP should back national popular vote before it’s too late
Republicans who see the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact as a blue-state plot to undermine and destroy our chances of winning presidential elections should think again.
Expanding the presidential battleground nationwide through the compact — which guarantees 270 electoral votes and the presidency to the candidate who wins the most popular votes across all 50 states and the District of Columbia — may prove the best, and only, way for President Trump and future GOP presidential candidates to succeed in an evolving political climate that easily could put Republicans on permanent defense.
Under the current winner-take-all system, used by 48 states to send electors to the Electoral College, 12 so-called “battleground states” typically determine who becomes president. For all practical purposes, we elect the president of the Battleground States of America, not the United States of America.
rump won eight of those 12 battleground states in 2016 by a total of more than 832,000 popular votes, clearly demonstrating that he can win a head-to-head contest with a Democrat. In fact, his performance in the battleground states suggests he would have won a rather substantial popular-vote victory over Hillary Clinton had the campaign been run across all 50 states. On the other hand, repeating an electoral-vote victory in 2020 under the current system may prove much more difficult.
The so-called “blue wall” is real. Examining voting patterns that have held relatively steady since 1988, the next Democratic nominee will begin with 242 likely electoral votes. That’s just a Florida or Texas win away from the White House.
World needs blockchain ‘Geneva Convention’
Switzerland needs to create a “Geneva Convention” to establish a global “gold standard” for cybersecurity and blockchain that is free of national interests, says the chairman and chief executive officer of Swiss digital security company Kudelski Group.
André Kudelski told Asia Times that a neutral and trusted global standard would counter the raging cyberwar between the United States, China and Russia.
State cyberwarfare, according to Kudelski, has greatly undermined the security and integrity of global banks, insurance companies and energy companies’ critical cybersecurity infrastructure and made them vulnerable to malicious attacks by terrorists and criminal hackers.
Some 82,000 Russia troops deployed along Ukrainian border, in Donbas, Crimea
The Russian Federation has about 82,000 regular troops deployed along the border with Ukraine, as well as in occupied Donbas, eastern Ukraine, and Crimea, a peninsula it annexed from Ukraine in March 2014.”These are active troops that can immediately increase their numbers during unforeseen military activities,” chief of the Verification Department of the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces Andriy Hudz said at a briefing, according to an UNIAN correspondent.
Intelligence chief says Ukrainian military may open fire at enemy without orderNow, there are more than 25 battalion task groups in Russia’s Rostov region along the state border of Ukraine, the 150th motorized rifle division is being actively formed there, he said.The groups deployed in Russia-occupied territory of Ukraine are managed by the tactical headquarters based in Rostov region’s Novocherkassk, which is part of the Southern Military District.
Hong Kong vs. General Secretary Xi Jinping
One of the most important struggles on the planet is taking place right now between the people of Hong Kong and the dictatorship of General Secretary Xi Jinping.
My next podcast on Sunday, June 23 will be on the meaning of the struggle in Hong Kong. This is an extraordinarily important moment.
The Communist Chinese system wanted to extend its ability to prosecute people in Hong Kong by passing a new law that would make it easy to extradite people from the Special Administrative Region to the mainland court system. Hong Kong residents saw this as a direct assault on their rights under the agreement that returned Hong Kong from British control to Chinese control.
The principle had been established that there would be one country but two systems. The British belief in the rule of law, due process, and free news media had been continued even after the colony left British control and was once again Chinese territory (which it had been before 1842).
Which Country Has Meddled with the Most Elections?
Even though most Americans might find it hard to believe, the US was not the first country to have an election meddled with by an intrusive foreign power.
In the US, reactions to the Mueller report have been all-American beyond belief. Let’s face it, when it comes to election meddling, it’s been me, me, me, 24/7 here. Yes, in some fashion, some set of Russians meddled in the last election campaign, whether it was, as Jared Kushner improbably claimed, “a couple of Facebook ads” or, as the Mueller report described it, “the Russian government interfer[ing] … in sweeping and systematic fashion.”
But let me mention just a few of the things that we didn’t learn from the Mueller report. We didn’t learn that Russian agents appeared at Republican Party headquarters in 2016 with millions of dollars in donations to influence the coming election. (Oops, my mistake! That was CIA agents in the Italian election of 1948!)
We didn’t learn that a Russian intelligence agency in combination with Chinese intelligence, aided by a major Chinese oil company, overthrew an elected US president and installed Donald Trump in the White House as their autocrat of choice. (Oops, my mistake again! That was the Central Intelligence Agency, dispatched by an American president, and British intelligence, with the help of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, later BP. In 1953, they overthrew Mohammad Mossadegh, the elected prime minister of Iran, and installed the young shah as an autocratic ruler, the very first — but hardly the last — time the CIA successfully ousted a foreign government.)
‘Self-Righteous’: Dem Staffer Headed To Prison As Prosecutors Look To Make Example Of Him For Politically-Motivated Crimes
A former Democratic congressional aide who doxxed Republican senators during a confirmation hearing for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh will be sentenced to prison Wednesday.
Former computer administrator Jackson Cosko carried out what prosecutors said was the largest known data theft in Senate history and used it to blackmail a witness, to plot to extort a senator and to threaten others.
He left operational spy devices on the Senate network that went undetected by police even after he was arrested and his plot was discovered, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors are seeking to make an example of Cosko for criminally attacking people who disagreed with him politically, citing a rise in such incidents.
President Trump Awards Arthur Laffer The Presidential Medal of Freedom
The White House has announced that President Trump is awarding Dr. Arthur B. Laffer the Presidential Medal of Freedom on June 19th. That, along with the Congressional Gold Medal, is America’s highest civilian award. It is well deserved.
Robert Mundell and Arthur Laffer were Supply-Side Economics’ premier intellectual architects. Supply-Side was roundly mocked by establishment Republicans such as George H.W. Bush, Reagan’s then-rival. Bush memorably dismissed it as “Voodoo Economics.” Most, though not all, Democrats mocked it. Many still do.
Who were the Supply-Siders? Jack Kemp was the political principal and Jeff Bell the political pioneer. Jude Wanniski was our Minister of Propaganda, Robert Novak served as the reporter-of-record and Warren Brookes, the columnist-in-chief. Bob Bartley turned “The Page” of the Wall Street Journal into a morally courageous beacon of sanity in stagflation’s darkness.
Bob Mundell later collected a Nobel Prize in Economics “for his analysis of monetary and fiscal policy under different exchange rate regimes and his analysis of optimum currency areas.”Businessman/philanthropist Lewis E. Lehrman and Kemp aide John Mueller, the American apostles of Jacques Rueff, prevailed with Kemp in their advocacy of the classical gold standard. And let us recall Supply-Side veterans Charles Kadlec, Alan Reynolds, Paul Craig Roberts, and Steve Entin. And Bruce Bartlett, who later apostatized.
U.S. Escalates Online Attacks on Russia’s Power Grid
The United States is stepping up digital incursions into Russia’s electric power grid in a warning to President Vladimir V. Putin and a demonstration of how the Trump administration is using new authorities to deploy cybertools more aggressively, current and former government officials said.
In interviews over the past three months, the officials described the previously unreported deployment of American computer code inside Russia’s grid and other targets as a classified companion to more publicly discussed action directed at Moscow’s disinformation and hacking units around the 2018 midterm elections.
Advocates of the more aggressive strategy said it was long overdue, after years of public warnings from the Department of Homeland Security and the F.B.I. that Russia has inserted malware that could sabotage American power plants, oil and gas pipelines, or water supplies in any future conflict with the United States.
‘Socialist’ Nordic Countries Are Actually Moving Toward Private Health Care
Rising support for socialism in the United States comes at a time when politicians like Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., promise a great many “free” services, to be provided or guaranteed by the government.
Supporters often point to nations with large social programs, such as Canada, the United Kingdom, and the Scandinavian states, particularly when it comes to health care.
Never mind that these are not true socialist countries, but highly taxed market economies with large welfare states. That aside, they do offer a government-guaranteed health service that many in America wish to emulate.
The problem for their argument is that, despite these extremely generous programs, some of these countries are seeing steady a growth of private health insurance.
FEE President Zilvinas Silenas’s FEEcon 2019 Speech
The recently inaugurated president talked about socialism, young people’s attraction to it, and FEE’s place in the battle of ideas.
Many of us are concerned that the growth of government in every area of our lives is getting worse. As the new president of FEE, I too worry about the future of free markets and individual liberty. Even now, socialist slogans—eerily close to ones I heard growing up in Lithuania under the Soviet Union—are being resuscitated in the US and, indeed, around the world.
This prompts the question: Are the ideas of liberty losing to the collectivist ideas of socialism?
