Ralph Benko is the author of The Websters’ Dictionary: how to use the Web to transform the world (The Websters’ Press, 2008) for which he won top honors, in 2010, after a worldwide vote, the Trophée du Choix des Internautes, from the Paris-based World eDemocracy Forum’s “Top Ten Who are Transforming the World of Internet and Politics.” Benko served the Susan B. Anthony List as network creator of TeamSarah.org. Under grant from the Searle Freedom Trust Benko presented best Web practices and technical guidance, and mentoring, to many public policy institutes.
Benko co-authored, with economist Charles Kadlec, The 21st Century Gold Standard: For Prosperity, Security, and Liberty. He, with Kadlec, served as commissioner and co-editor of an important new translation of Copernicus’s On the Minting of Money, published by Laissez-Faire Books in 2013. He served as an advisor to, and editor of, the premier autonomous gold standard website, the Lehrman Institute’s TheGoldStandardNow.org, for which he was nominated as Nonprofit Blogger of the Year in 2014 by the National Bloggers Club. He is editor-in-chief of TheSupplySide.blogspot.com and a weekly contributor of editorial features to Forbes.com as A Golden Age and freelances elsewhere.
During the Reagan administration he served as an attorney-advisor, finance for the United States Department of Energy for synthetic and renewable energy and served on detail as a deputy general counsel to a White House conference in the Executive Office of the President and the Presidential Commission n Privatization. In 1986, Benko founded The Prosperity Caucus, in Washington, DC, a monthly meeting of free market policy makers featured as the cover story in the National Journal.
Under the President George W. Bush administration he worked closely with the White House Office for Faith-based & Community Initiatives in support of this leading White House domestic policy area. He thereafter worked under the auspices of the United States Department of Health and Human Services Operation Rescue and Restore as a principal community organizer to organize seven regions in identifying and assisting in the rescue of human trafficking victims in the United States.
Benko is the president of The Alinsky Center. He also serves as a founding director of the Samaritan Medal Foundation. This Holy Land-based nonprofit association represents the original Israelite-Samaritan people (currently numbering 800 souls) of Scriptural fame (the parable of the Good Samaritan, among other references) and annually presents medals for Peace and Humanitarian Achievement. The Foundation also awards medals for scholarly achievement in Samaritan studies.
At the recommendation of Gold Commissioner Lewis E. Lehrman, Benko was called by the U.S. Department of the Treasury to testify before the United States Gold Commission in 1981 on the constitutional history of American monetary policy as one of its 23 official witnesses. He published thereafter on that subject in the New York State Bar Association’s Banking, Corporation & Business Law Newsletter (lead article), the Dallas Morning News, and elsewhere, and has remained actively interested in all areas of economic growth policy.
Born in New York, New York in 1952 he received his Bachelor of Arts degree at Amherst College, Class of 1974, and received the degree of Juris Doctor from Boston University Law School in 1979 and is a member of the Bar, in retired status, of the State of New York.
