Laurence Vance | The Libertarian Institute

Why Libertarians Loathe Tariffs

by Laurence Vance | Jun 11, 2024 | Economics, Featured Articles

Former president and current Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump loves tariffs. In his 2011 book Time to Get Tough: Making America #1 Again, Trump included as part of his five-part tax policy “a 20 percent tax for importing goods.” During his first campaign for president, he called for a 35% tariff on cars and trucks imported from a proposed new Ford plant in Mexico and a 45% tariff on all imported goods from China “if they don’t behave.” Mexico is our largest trading partner, while China is third, contributing about 12% of total U.S. foreign trade. Although Trump once declared...

The Social Security and Medicare Scams

by Laurence Vance | Apr 1, 2024 | Featured Articles

Charlotte Cowles is a financial advice columnist for The Cut, “a New York Magazine site dedicated to women’s lives and interests, including politics, work, money, relationships, style, and parenting.” She recently lost $50,000 when she fell for a scam, put that amount in cash in a shoe box, and handed it over to a stranger that she was duped into thinking was an undercover CIA agent. The scam she fell for is not that unusual. According to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), consumers reported losing nearly $8.8 billion to scams in 2022. The FTC received fraud reports from 2.4 million...

School Vouchers, and Your Tax Money

by Laurence Vance | Nov 29, 2023 | Featured Articles

Conservative and libertarian proponents of “school choice,” that is, government-provided educational vouchers that allow low-income parents to send their children to the school of their choice—which usually means private schools that they would otherwise not be able to afford—now generally make only two arguments in defense of government-provided educational vouchers. They used to maintain that a voucher system was a necessary gradual and intermediate step toward the goal of ending public education. In John Merrifield’s School Choices: True and False (2002), in which he endorses the voucher...

Who Is Doing the Discriminating?

by Laurence Vance | Jul 12, 2023 | Featured Articles

Conservatives are cheering and progressives are crying about the recent Supreme Court decision in the case of Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, which was consolidated with Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina et al. The cases began in 2014 when Students for Fair Admission (SFFA)—a nonprofit organization whose stated purpose is “to defend human and civil rights secured by law, including the right of individuals to equal protection under the law”—sued Harvard University and the University of North Carolina on behalf of...

Not a Single American Deserved to Die in Korea

by Laurence Vance | Jun 7, 2023 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

The remains of an American soldier were laid to rest on Memorial Day at the Andersonville National Cemetery in Georgia after a police car with lights flashing escorted the casket to the cemetery. What made this funeral service so unique and so tragic is that Pfc. Luther Herschel Story was killed on September 1, 1950, during the Korean War. He was just eighteen years old. Story left high school during his sophomore year and enlisted in the Army. In the summer of 1950, he deployed to Korea with Company A of the 1st Battalion, 9th Infantry Regiment. After he was wounded when his unit came under...

NPR Can’t Justify Its Existence

by Laurence Vance | Apr 24, 2023 | Featured Articles

One of the hallmarks of authoritarian countries is that the media is state-run or under the direct supervision or control of the government. The Xinhua News Agency is the official state news agency in China. Al-Akhbar, Al-Ahram, and Al-Gomhuriya are state-owned national newspapers in Egypt. Cuba prohibits privately owned media. According to Reporters Without Borders, China, Egypt, and Cuba are ranked near the bottom of its 2022 Press Freedom Index, along with Myanmar, Vietnam, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. The top five countries for press freedom are Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Estonia, and Finland....

Can a Libertarian Support ‘Law and Order’?

by Laurence Vance | Apr 17, 2023 | Criminal Justice, Featured Articles

The election year of 1968 was a tumultuous one marked by the assassinations of Sen. Robert Kennedy and civil rights leader Martin Luther King, urban race riots, college antiwar demonstrations, and a Democratic National Convention that saw the Chicago police and the National Guard have violent clashes with protestors. The 1968 Election Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon (1913–1994) campaigned on a platform of “law and order” in the 1968 election. In his acceptance speech for the Republican nomination at the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach, he said: The first civil...

Foreign Aid Doesn’t Need Oversight, It Needs To Be Abolished

by Laurence Vance | Mar 27, 2023 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

In an interview with ABC News last month, after it was noted that U.S. aid to Ukraine now totals at least $113 billion, President Joe Biden was told that “many” Americans were asking, “How long can we spend like this?” His response was to first question the number of Americans who were really asking such a question, and then to limit the questioners to “the MAGA crowd” and “right-wing Republicans.” President Biden maintained that the United States is “in a situation where the cost of doing—of walking away could be considerably higher than the cost of helping Ukraine maintain its...