Libertarianism is not an all-or-nothing philosophy. Different libertarians advocate for different levels of government intervention. An emergency situation, eg., a major war, disaster, irreplaceable resource exhaustion, etc. will almost certainly require a lot of government action. This FAQ aims to show that barring such extremely rare situations that can be handled then using exceptional measures, libertarianism works, and therefore they are no reason to forego libertarianism altogether.

To show this, we go through situations where it seems like the free market would be unfair, and explain why they won't be an issue.

The state takes a portion of your money and decides for you how it should be spent, imposes innumerable restrictions on you, and destroys your life if you disobey. On top of that, not only is the public sector less efficient than the private sector due to the lack of competition, private entities are burdened by unnecessary regulations. The justification given for this is that it improves the average well-being in several ways. But what if all the human effort spent on government is actually harmful? What if we're better off using it elsewhere if we want a more fair and prosperous society? That is what this FAQ aims to convice you of.

If the wages for a profession seem too low, it's because there are too many workers in the industry – the free market is just disincentivizing wasted human effort. Leave the job – if you have no other skills, invest in education. If enough people do, wages should rise. Of course, wages won't go beyond the profit each worker can generate, but that shouldn't be the limiting factor for the vast majority of jobs. If it is, and not enough people are willing to work for those wages, the companies will have to come up with some way of improving worker productivity.

If someone buys up a lot of the food and medicine and tries to resell it at a high price, people will have to buy it, since unlike for non-essentials, they can't just wait for the market to make more, they need it immediately. But this can be solved easily by the community signing an agreement with the supplier before production.

All claimed land will be privately owned; patronize places (neighbourhoods, restaurants, streets, beaches, parks, etc.) which implement the rules that you want. Such places also have an incentive to enforce said rules to not just attract but keep their target customers.

Some sewage systems, power generation, forests, beaches, etc., may currently be government owned. They can also be redistributed similar to roads and the water supply. Any profits gained by these will be distributed proportional to the shares owned.

While corporate-owned roads are certainly possible, they would require continuous tracking of vehicles to charge them, and the tracking infrastructure would be a privacy nightmare and great additional cost. For the true solution, consider that all the currently needed roads have already been built by the government; the only required cost is to maintain them, and very rarely, build new ones. Upon transitioning to libertarianism, government roads will be transferred to the people, and maintenance costs will be paid for willingly by those whose lands are accessed via those roads.

Since a government already went ahead and used our taxes to build roads, we'll have to decide upon transition exactly how shares of the entities controlling different roads should be distributed among the people, and locals will have to plan collective payment for maintaining the roads. But it is doubtless that people will not let the roads leading to their land fall into disrepair, as it would discourage visitors to their businesses and homes.

When you enter a building, buy a product, or avail a service, you have a reasonable assumption of safety and efficacy. If this is not true, not providing a clear warning is fraud. Private organizations that verify the same will naturally pop up. Obviously, them making false assurances would be fraud as well.

Firstly, it's actually legal in the US to yell fire in a theatre, and their theatres seem fine. Anyway, theatres just legally requiring customers not to make disruptions would have the exact same effect as the government banning it.

Let's say company X spends $14M to discover a much better production method, and starts using it to sell cheaper/better goods in the market. Big company Y decides to spend tens of millions to discover it themselves, and at great speed, hiring many scientists, and conducting lots of trials simultaneously. It looks like it'll take Y only 60 weeks to make the discovery, and 20 weeks to bring it to production.

Within that time, X realizes they won't be able to make $14M profit. So they decide to sell the discovery to Y for $12–14M on the condition that Y waits 40 weeks before launching the product. Y agrees, because they save time and money. During those 40 weeks, X makes $6M profit, bringing their total to $18–20M. The $4–6M is a more than excellent return for the time X spent discovering it.

Now that both X and Y have the discovery, they can either compete against each other, in which case all is good, or they can act as one and fix prices. In the latter case, big company Z decides to spend 10s of millions to discover it themselves and beat XY's pricing, in which case the story repeats.

The use of exact numbers makes it seem like this example is attempting to fool you somehow, but the only essential part is another company having the capability to rediscover the method. They won't even have to try, Y can just offer to buy it, with the implication that they will go all out trying to rediscover it unless X agrees to sell.

Thus no human effort is actually wasted discovering the same thing multiple times. Now things might not work out this way all the time, but in a free market, it will most of the time, and that's enough. Remember, the alternative we're trying to prevent is one company being able to charge whatever price they want for a potentially must-have discovery, for decades.

If you're literally penniless and need immediate funds, see the section on welfare. Only join companies that allow employees to unionize. Or find funding and form a cooperative. If enough people join the union that there aren't enough ununionized empoyees left, the employers will have no choice. If that is not the case, either the conditions must not be so bad, or there are more people than needed in the industry, which means some people need to leave and libertarianism is just preventing wasted human effort.

For a stable society, people need assurance that they will not be spied on, so we must slightly extend the concept of private property to include personal space. Otherwise, someone repeatedly coming within a centimeter of you and using the "I'm not touching you" kindergarten taunt would be totally allowed. The extent of this personal space is context dependent, and could be the toilet, changing room, bedroom, underneath a skirt, etc. If someone's personal space is in overlap with your private property, you cannot immediately violate said space, but can ask them to leave, and take measures to remove them only if they don't comply within a reasonable timeframe.

Today, shipping costs are so low (eg., $0.50 per kg for US-China shipments) that for most goods, the market is global.

But what if the main water supply in a region is owned by a single entity, and they charge exorbitant prices? Unlike food, bringing in water from faraway regions would be too expensive. Of course, people moving out would result in the entity going out of business and selling the water supply to someone more rational, but due to various reasons, moving out isn't always easy.

Here's the true solution. Currently, the water supply in most countries is owned by the government. Upon transition to libertarianism, the water supply in each region would simply be an entity with ownership distributed among the residents. If some of them sell their shares of the water supply to a company that then jacks up the prices, they'll have to move out, but that is simply them facing the consequences of risking putting their water supply in another's hands.

What if the water supply was sold by the government to a private entity currently subject to regulations? Would a libertarian transition remove those regulations? Note that this situation is caused by having to transition from big government to libertarianism. If a libertarian society arose naturally, rights to natural resources would be distributed among the community via the principle of homesteading. And as before, anyone selling their rights must be moving or have another source ready, othewise accept the potential consequences.

To fix the issues caused by a non-libertarian government, non-libertarian measured may be needed. The government had no right to the water, nor to sell it to the private entity. It may need to be taken back.

Anarcho-capitalists advocate for private (self/community/corporate) enforcement of the NAP, thus eliminating the government entirely. Doubts as to whether this will leave more people unprotected than a government solution keep people from supporting it, but this minarchist FAQ can be extended into an ancap one if/when sufficiently convincing arguments are collected.

If simply concerned about wild species going extinct, and not their their occasional mistreatment (which is discussed above), species will be conserved by the free market to the extent that there is interest in them and the ecosystems that they support, eg., in zoos, wildlife tourism, forest products, etc.