Libertarian FAQ:About

From Libertarian FAQ

This wiki website answers frequently asked questions about libertarianism and free market economics. Anybody can add questions and any libertarian can aswer or edit questions. Below please find more information about the LibertarianFAQ-project.

For newcomers

Perhaps a friend shocked you with his libertarian ideas and referred you to this site. Perhaps you were searching on the internet for some more information about themes such as the free market, government failure, the war on drugs, foreign policy and so on. Or perhaps you followed a link from another site to this LibertarianFAQ.

However you ended up here, it is likely that you have some, or even a lot of questions about the ideas of political and economic liberty. Perhaps you already think taxes are too high, that there is too much regulation, that governments interfere too much with your personal life, but don't know what an alternative would look like. Or you simply cannot believe that a friend of yours or other people seriously think that government should be ‘’way’’ smaller and you have a lot of questions about this ideology. This website will answer all your questions.

Normally, people feel that nobody should be allowed to initiate aggression against a person or his property and liberty: killing, stealing, kidnapping and so on are morally unjust. Libertarians hold that these simple rules should also apply to the state: no government should be allowed to initiate aggression against a person’s life, property or liberty. This means that conscription, aggressive wars, taxation, government regulation governing both the personal (such as the war on drugs) and economic life (such as rent control) are morally wrong.

Now while you may be sympathetic to the ideas of personal and economic liberty (‘free markets and free minds’), it is likely that you are skeptical as to whether such an ideal can result in a liveable society: if government does not provide health care, then the poor would suffer; if governments do not make laws prohibiting it, then children would work in factories, if education is free, then all sorts of extremist groups would indoctrinate their children, if drugs were legal then many more people would use them and crime would increase: and so on.

This skepticism is understandable because libertarianism, although the ideology of the Founding Fathers, sounds like such a radical idea (and that other radical idea, communism, wasn’t such a great success either). But on this website you will see how we can successfully apply this simple idea to hundreds or even thousands of political and economic subjects: how government interferes with life in the current situation and what the libertarian alternative would look like.

While libertarianism is the ‘’moral/political’’ theory about what behavior should be punishable, Austrian Economics is the value-neutral, '’practical’’ theory that shows how exactly the ideas of liberty lead to a prosperous, diverse, creative, innovative, and peaceful society: it is not only ‘’right’’ that people should be free, it is also ‘’true’’ that people must be free if they are to prosper.

Austrian Economics shows that the ideal of liberty does not just ‘’sound’’ nice, but is superior in a practical sense too: take government out of the business of education and schools will become better and cheaper; stop government subsidizing farmers and food will become cheaper and better; stop government health care and you will see innovations in health care comparable to those in the computer industry; and so on.

Not convinced yet? Then by all means start asking questions and reading the answers!

Get Started!

To get started exploring these ides and their consequences try this brief introduction. If you want to see if your question about some aspect of the free market is already answered on the website you can do a search by keyword in the seach box on the left or view the list of keywords on the main page. If your question is not on the website yet, you can submit it simply by creating a new page with your question as page title. Please also remember to put a link to your question from the appropriate questons category. For an overview of submitted questions that are still waiting for an answer click here. Finally, for guidelines on answering questions and editing answers click here.

Contact

This website is an idea by Koen Swinkels () and Henry Sturman ().