Markets 
Just about a year after signing the One Big, Beautiful Bill with its major league tax cuts, the stock market is roaring.
In this year’s second quarter, the S&P 500 is up 15 percent and the NASDAQ up 21 percent — the best performance in 6 years. The small-cap Russell 2000 had the best first half in 35 years. The Dow Jones index is above 52,000.
Business is booming and profitable. Employment is rising. Oil and gas prices are coming down. The dollar is strong.
America is getting ready to celebrate the July 4th signing of the Declaration of Independence 250 years ago. Here’s what President Reagan said to the Republican National Convention in 1980, on the eve of his landslide victory over President Carter.
“Can we doubt that only a Divine Providence placed this land, this island of freedom, here as a refuge for all those people in the world who yearn to breathe free?”
Reagan loved to talk about freedom. It’s a wonderfully powerful word.
So is the most important sentence in history from the Declaration of Independence, that we “are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
I keep coming back to this because it’s so important. And I keep thinking about freedom and free-enterprise, I keep thinking about liberty and limited government, the rule of law and private property, free market competition, and individual incentives.
They all go together. They all underscore the greatness of American core values and our economy. We reward the entrepreneurial spirit and the risk takers who define it. It’s so important.
Yet we must defend freedom and free-enterprise. We must avoid the burdens of taxation and regulation and foolish socialist government giveaways.
Instead, we must reward work — for work itself is a core value. Like Reagan and President Trump and the founders, I believe America’s best days are ahead. Yet we must fight for these freedoms.
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