LaTeX subset that output nicely to HTML.

Too insane though due to LaTeX roots, better just move to newer HTML-first markups like OurBigBook Markup or markdown.

Hello! I'm the official admin account for the OurBigBook Project!

Proof: docs.ourbigbook.com/ourbigbook-admin

If the resource is replaceable, like fossil fuels, the free market will invest appropriately in alternatives as and when needed. As for irreplaceable resources, it would be a very rare situation for there to only exist a few sources of it globally, controlled by a few entities, and for them to all stop competing and fix prices. This would be a global crisis requiring international action and co-operation for diplomacy, sanctions, and acquiring new sources/technologies. Clearly not a usual scenario that can be used to dismiss libertarianism.

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.

We have to distinguish between two types of creations. We'll discuss how the cost of coming up with both can be recouped without intellectual property and its awfulness.

There are several ways to make a profit, life would be pretty boring otherwise. Examples include:

But none of these factors are so powerful that a company in a free market can extract exorbitant profits from a customer unwillingly paying with no better choice. Note that intellectual property would not exist in a libertarian system. Of course, people sometimes buy products/services without doing their due diligence or simply not caring enough about ease of quitting, ease of repair, control, etc., and later face difficulties, but that is simply the consequence of their own decisions.

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.

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 you believe unverified information, you will lose money.

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.

At first glance, it would seem pretty ironic for an FAQ that lambasts intellectual property rights to place restrictions on its own distribution, even if just attribution. But asking for attribution is consistent with libertarianism.

It is to prevent people passing this FAQ off as their own work, as they could get social/monetary benefits from doing so, and that should be considered fraud. Even if they don't explicitly claim to be the author when using its contents, that is likely to be assumed by most readers, so not explicitly disclaiming it should be treated as fraud.

This does not mean that anyone who doesn't provide attribution must be sued into oblivion; the punishment must be proportional to the crime, after all, and in most cases, any personal clout gained from omitting attribution will be negligible. But for the very few cases where it's not, the license facilitates the prosecution of such fraud in the current legal system.

Insider trading can discourage investment, and cause CEOs to hide information from employees. While there have been arguments that insider trading makes share prices more quickly go to their proper value, the true solution is that if investors dislike insider trading, companies can legally declare that they will only work with those that legally agree not to trade its shares or facilitate insider trading. If someone unaffiliated with the company simply overhears or comes across insider information, this won't stop them, but even if it were illegal, it would be nearly impossible to prove such a case.

That the person you're about to attack may have a gun on them will deter the majority of attackers. If nobody had guns, only melee weapons, it would be easy for a group to attack someone, say with baseball bats, etc., suffer little to no injury themselves, and get away. If everyone has a gun, you can ambush someone on the street, but will likely get killed by bystander. If you target someone in a location where they see/hear you coming, like their home or workplace, the attackers will suffer more harm than the "victim". This is more effective deterrent and solution to attacks than the police, who can almost always arrive only after the crime is over.

In countries with gun rights, like the US, the chance of someone not involved in crime being killed in a shooting is very low, and the number of victims in suicidal mass shootings can be minimized if even more bystanders have guns. It is unfortunate that it is impossible to quantify the number of attacks/muggings that never happened because the possibility of people being armed stopped them. This number is almost certainly huge.

Moreover, one otherwise cannot guarantee that the government will never ever turn tyrannical. An armed populace almost certainly can.

It is important to note that nowhere is discrimination against every category prohibited. Nearly all businesses would turn down certain types of customers. Only discrimination against certain protected characteristics, usually (but not always) immutable ones, irrelevant to the business, is prohibited.

In a democracy, the passing of a law prohibiting discrimination against a certain group requires the majority to be against said discrimination. This means that this group won't be discriminated against by most people anyway. Those that do will suffer losses from missed customers. People strongly opposed to the discrimination may even counter-discriminate, boycotting those that do.

In such a situation, it doesn't seem all that necessary to legally prohibit discrimination, especially to libertarians, who believe that no one can be forced to serve another for whatever reason, even "social justice".

A third trimester baby can survive outside the womb with medical help nowadays, so aborting it could be considered wrong for that reason, but assume a time period or situation where this isn't the case. The bodily autonomy argument would mean that a (hypothetical) 9th month abortion is okay in the above situation.

This involves killing an intelligent human, and as mentioned before, almost no one would morally agree with this, except in situations where the mother’s life is at risk. And an argument which leads to a disagreeable conclusion, is itself disagreeable. So this argument for abortion isn't very good, but that doesn't mean other arguments for it aren't.