Libertarianism FAQ @libertarianism  0

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.

Everything we do is an investment, with the potential for profit and the risk of loss. The same applies to education. You invest money from loans or personal funds to undergo training. You take on the risk of flunking or the skill you learnt lessening in demand. The true value of any investment is the value people give to in a free market. There is no reason to forcibly transfer money via taxation and give extra favors to one type of investment, subsidising it by taxing (artificially and additionally disadvantaging) others.

The owners of roads are incentivized to set reasonable rules so that people want to use their roads.

That would be confinement. You can't just build a wall around someone and say, "Hey, I haven't harmed you or your property." You are still violating their property rights, more specifically, their right to access property.

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.

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.

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.

If your pollution damages the property of others, that would violate the NAP, and a minarchy would be justified in collecting penalties for the same and distributing them to the people affected. This should incentivize the company to try and prevent or clean up its pollution as much as possible. We need to decide the extent of such penalties, and whether penalties other than monetary ones would be even more effective at preventing pollution.

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.

This is really a question of how much of the rights of a human do we give animals? Giving them no rights doesn't make sense from an ethical perspective as they have sentience and the capacity to feel pain. And yet we don't grant them the right not to be confined or killed, not just because it would make meat-eating humans unhappy, but also because rights are a human concept, and animals in nature are so horribly brutal that it seems incongruous to try and make humans not confine or kill them.

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.

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.

This is an unsolvable problem because there's no way to extract large amounts of value from a person without cruelty, and even with cruelty, there's a limit to how much you can extract.

Libertarian morality is as follows: According to the principle of homesteading, each man owns his
own person, and he therefore owns the things which he produces – those parts of nature hitherto unowned and which,
when mixed with his labor, are transformed into productive
entities. The only moral ways for these entities to change ownership are voluntary trade and gift-giving.

Those who are productive with their property become
responsible for more and more, since they can afford to buy up additional property with their earnings. The overall productivity therefore, will rise.

In a free market, the one who provides a good/service for the lowest price gets nearly all the customers. The one offering the highest for the same job gets nearly all the employees. No one wants to let another do this and dominate the industry, so they all compete against each other for customers and employees. Employees can also form unions to demand payment almost equal to the value they bring.

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.

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.

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.

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.