Laurence Vance | The Libertarian Institute

Donald Trump Promises to Protect the Welfare State

by Laurence Vance | Mar 9, 2023 | Featured Articles

In a recent brief video message to his supporters, former president and current 2024 presidential candidate Donald Trump warned Republicans about cutting Medicare or Social Security: Under no circumstances should Republicans vote to cut a single penny from Medicare or Social Security to help pay for Joe Biden’s reckless spending spree...Do not cut the benefits our seniors worked for and paid for their entire lives. Save Social Security. Don’t destroy it! The Democrats are looking to destroy Social Security. We’re not going to let them do it. Senator J. D. Vance (R-Ohio) tweeted that Trump...

The Government’s War on Consumption Is a War Against Liberty

by Laurence Vance | Feb 22, 2023 | Featured Articles

Although Americans believe that they live in a free country — some would even say the freest country on earth — that freedom is limited and relative. The Cato Institute’s Human Freedom Index “presents the state of human freedom in the world based on a broad measure that encompasses personal, civil, and economic freedom.” The United States is ranked 15th, behind such countries as Switzerland, Ireland, and Finland. In the Press Freedom Index issued annually by Reporters without Borders, the United States is only ranked 42nd, behind such countries as Guyana, Latvia, and Namibia. The Heritage...

Hands Off My Income

by Laurence Vance | Jan 17, 2023 | Featured Articles

House Democrats finally obtained former president Donald Trump’s tax returns and promptly released them to the public. No one should have his tax returns released: not presidents, not politicians, not celebrities, not sports figures, not cab drivers. Released was nearly 6,000 pages of six years of individual and business income tax returns for the years 2015 through 2020. The returns show that Trump paid $750 in federal taxes in 2017, $0 in 2020, and had negative adjusted gross income in four of the six years. His highest year for charitable giving was 2017, when he donated $1.8 million. But...

When $5 Trillion Is Not Enough

by Laurence Vance | Nov 28, 2022 | Featured Articles

The federal government seized from the American people almost $5 trillion ($4.896119 trillion) in fiscal year 2022 (Oct. 1, 2021 through Sept. 30, 2022), according to The Monthly Treasury Statement of Receipts and Outlays of the United States Government (MTS), published by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service. But this was still not enough to quench Uncle Sam’s huge appetite for spending money. During the same period of time, the federal government spent $6.271508 trillion, resulting in a budget deficit of $1.375389 trillion and a national debt that increased to over $31 trillion. The growth in...

The Truth About Oregon’s Drug Decriminalization ‘Disaster’

by Laurence Vance | Oct 18, 2022 | Criminal Justice, Featured Articles

Critics are calling Oregon’s Drug Addiction Treatment and Recovery Act a failure. According to Oregon’s ABC affiliate KATU: “Oregon still has among the highest addiction rates in the country. Fatal overdoses have increased almost 20% over the previous year, with over a thousand dead. Over half of addiction treatment programs in the state lack capacity to meet demand because they don’t have enough staffing and funding.” The real disaster, however, is that Oregon instituted a drug decriminalization and treatment program instead of drug freedom. In 2020, Oregon voters approved—by a vote of...

Whether Medicinally Effective or Not, Marijuana Ought to Be Legal

by Laurence Vance | Jun 22, 2022 | Featured Articles

Earlier this year, Mississippi became the 37th state to legalize the medical use of marijuana, which is also legal in the U.S. territories of the District of Columbia, the Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. Since California became the first state to legalize medical marijuana in 1996, every couple of years, another state or two are added to the list (there were five in 2016). It is inevitable that the medical use of marijuana will eventually be legal in all 50 states. The effectiveness of medical marijuana has been debated ever since the residents of...

The GOP Is Not Your Savior

by Laurence Vance | Jun 16, 2021 | Featured Articles, Politics

If Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) had not gotten sick and resigned his Senate seat, then the title of this article would have been “Will the Republicans Save Us?” After serving in the Georgia state house and senate, Isakson served three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives before being elected to the U.S. Senate in 2004. He was re-elected in 2010 and 2016. Although his Senate term did not expire until January 2023, in August 2019 he announced that because of his Parkinson’s disease and other health challenges, he was resigning his Senate seat effective at the end of 2019. Under Georgia...

Should Libertarians Compromise with Taxing Marijuana?

by Laurence Vance | May 4, 2021 | Featured Articles, Libertarianism

Marijuana freedom is a good thing. The taxation of marijuana is a bad thing. Unfortunately, owing to the greed of spendthrift politicians, it looks as though we will have to take the good with the bad or not at all. Now, this does not mean that smoking marijuana is “good.” It just means that the freedom to smoke marijuana — and be responsible for any negative consequences that may come with it — is a good thing. On the federal level, a bill (H.R.3884) to decriminalize marijuana that would have removed “marijuana from the list of scheduled substances under the Controlled Substances Act” and...