Mystery of Mysteries, My Public Library
The universe is full of mysteries; like when does the phone company collect the coins in pay telephones? (Have you ever seen a guy in a phone company uniform lugging a satchel full of quarters out of the airport phone booths?) Why is it that your driver’s-side windshield wiper is ALWAYS the faulty one? And why do we Southerners say “lyberry� instead of “library�?
This latter question leads me to one of the great political conundrums of our time. Why are municipalities in the book-lending business?
Law enforcement and road maintenance as municipal monopolies I can almost understand. These are common, basic functions with a long history of municipal management. Maybe it’s an irrational history, but at least it’s traditional; and maybe assigned to the public sector because they are essential to municipal life. But come to think of it, so are bread, milk, and meat and I know of no cities in the grocery business.
Sure, I need policemen because if law enforcement crumbles, violent guys without paychecks or scruples will explore my mattress at midnight looking for my cache. If the city-supported streets crumble, I’m as immobile as Homopithicanthrupus, who thought a vine ride between two trees was a great public transportation system.
But no library? Am I intellectually marooned? No. There’s the Internet, the bookstores, the newspapers, my wife bursting with news, and the neighbor next door who’s dying to show me slides of his trip to Brazil. Where’s the showstopper?
Let no one say, (before reading at least two or three basic economic texts from the pubic library) that the municipally-owned library system is free. We pay with our taxes, which is the worst form of compensation from a consumer point of view, since it attenuates the relationship between supplier and consumer. The kid who cuts my yard loves that $40 weekly check. He loves ME. I stand out in his vision as the man with the pen who writes the check. The relationship between his work and the 40 dollars that buys his gas and pizzas and T-shirts is as clear as the big, red rounds of pepperoni on his 5-topping pizza. When I ask for a better trim around my pecan tree, the responsive smile and the roar of his weedwacker is instantaneous.
And I’m still somebody special when I hand over $2.49 at the Krystal counter for three burgers, an order of small fries, and a large Coke. True, the server’s smile is a micro-second slower than the yard man when I ask for extra onion and pickle. I’m not quite as grand since she doesn’t get to keep the entire $2.49. Only the minuscule fraction that makes up her paycheck. But she still grasps the dependency between her and me.
This relationship is cloudier between book-borrower and librarian since there’s no money transaction in exchange for her services. I’m not her pizza provider. I’m only one of a couple hundred thousand citizen-employers that stream through the library. And this dim, invisible host of consumers stands far behind the bureaucracy that writes her paycheck. Her smile, when I get it and her search for the requested bio of Frederic Bastiat comes from her heart - not her pocketbook. Her inherent goodness is her only motivation.
But sometimes, when she has a toothache or her husband forgets to come home the night before, her goodness is not sufficient. I get no smile and the search for Bastiat is half-hearted. Now, my yard man has toothaches, too: and maybe the night before his Alicia danced home at 2:00 A.M. smelling of merlot and infidelity. But he tries a little bit harder than my remuneratively remote librarian. He vividly associates the two twenty dollar bills from my wallet with a six-pack, two fried chicken dinners, and Alicia’s romantic remorse after her chicken dinner.
My librarian has yet to learn the lesson my daughter learned upon entering the world of waitressing. Early in life she had heard rumors that there was a relationship between performance and reward. In fact, she had studied it in her college economic courses. And some of her teachers even believed in capitalism, which lays a heavy stress on the performance/reward relationship. All the professors knew about it and they tested her understanding in the final exam via a heavily weighted question: “True or False; out there beyond those ivyed halls, those who work harder and smarter make more money.� She got it right, too. But somehow three single dollar bills beside a plate of leftover Chicken Alfredo spoke louder than any economics professor she had ever heard. Sleeping or waking. It was an economic epiphany. Giddy with delight, she was energized by the discovery that prompt delivery of food - warmed with a smile - allowed her eventually to purchase a serviceable used car. She smiled and moved briskly and responsively for the duration of her career as a server. So, why not apply this concept to the book-borrowing business.
If somewhere in the U.S. Constitution or the Bill of Rights there’s a mandate that Hometown, USA must be in the book business, let’s at least change the funding concept. No municipal budget. A user’s fee instead. Whatever the marketplace will bear. Charge a fee to all users except for the walletless, the homeless, the bookless who realize that they can’t live on bread alone. Give it to them free - absolutely free. To each according to his intellectual needs. We’d still have a more responsive, efficient library system. That fee, forked over by the reader, would validate Jane T. Bookborrower as the “customer� and light up the mind of the library employee with the knowledge that the customer is the virtual writer of her paycheck.
Libraries, sadly have a kinship with all government spawned organizations - a voracious appetite for funding. They recognize no boundaries. You can’t tell a forest fire to stop at Graham County and you can’t tell a library to restrain their services to books, or films, or CDs. They’ll always discard such discrete well-defined words and services in favor of fuzzier, more expensive services like “information�. Thereby expanding their employees, facilities, and self importance - an entirely human failing. In the real world out there the marketplace would shape their destiny. In the world of municipal budgets there’s no such fairy godmother.
Even worse, the budgeteers of libraries - with voters on the brink of rebellion - have the gall to charge for the newer, most popular books. Our free municipal, non-profit, taxpayer-supported repositories of knowledge have reverted to the for-profit lending libraries of a half century ago. Every department store of my youth had one. They went broke. But don’t worry about your municipal library. It will grow like a weed in fertilizer regardless of appropriate services, regardless of inventory, regardless of demand. Your local library will grow fat as a tick on a hound’s belly.
How did the cities get into the book lending business? What a dissertation topic for a PhD candidate at Libertarian U.
Comments (13)
Justin
The Straight Dope on how public libraries got started: http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mpublibrary.html
Published: April 16, 2006 4:58 PM
bobo
People now would rather go to Starbucks or Barnes and Nobles with a Starbucks inside than to the library. 10 years ago this was not the case. Plus, now we have the internet, so....
Published: April 16, 2006 6:51 PM
quincunx
I worked at the local public library when I was 14. I was the guy that put away the fiction h-z, and 700 art books. I was able to put away 6 carts of books in a 3 hour shift. But this ability was frowned upon - and I had to do it slowly and "more accurately". Ofcourse to me, accurately and quickly was not mutually exclusive. I remember getting a notice for being found not working and reading in the back section. I explained: I was told to do 3 carts, I did 2, and had plenty of time to do the third. I was told this is my final warning - I have to go slow and not leave. Not being able to shelve books at a snail's pace - I quit a month after that, after having worked a little over a year. The library is clearly about being efficient (at soaking your tax dollars).
Published: April 16, 2006 7:31 PM
ted roberts
Justin, thanks for your reference - will check it out. I'd guess the public school system provides some small rationale for the city to be in the book business. When I was a kid 100 year ago, every dept store ( so they were called) had a "lending library" but of course couldn't compete vs the free city library.
Bobo, rite, who needs them now.
Ted
Published: April 16, 2006 8:33 PM
Person
You make him take a check when paying him $40? God that's lame.
Published: April 16, 2006 9:57 PM
Paul D
"Liberry" is something small children say before they learn to form their sounds properly. (source: the Beastly Book of Mispronunciations)
The funny thing about libraries is that the current anti-liberty copyright regime would never allow them to exist if they were invented today; however, since the state's been monopolizing them for so long, they see no inherent contradiction between letting people borrow, use, and copy books, CDs, and DVDs from the library while punishing other people for borrowing, using, and copying the same from non-library sources.
Published: April 16, 2006 10:47 PM
Larry N. Martin
Good point, Paul. If we could get major copyright holders to sue the libraries for copyright infringement, then we'd either be done with libraries or copyrights.
;-)
Published: April 17, 2006 6:44 PM
david Chaplin
funny you should mention that. I have never lived in the US and know little about municipal histories. But in my home town of Fish Hoek ( In South Africa), the public library was started by residents of the town around the 1920s, as a community initiative - interested busybodies gave their time , and scared up some donations of books, and raised funds in the time-honoured way - collecting on street corners on Saturday mornings and buying books with the proceeds. Nice, co-operative community activity , initiated by the residents of the town, for the residents of the town, with a complete absence of coercion on the part of any authorities. Staffed by volunteers who gave their time freely.
I would imagine this was reflected in many towns across the country in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Fast forward through the 20th century, and you see the heavy hand of government tightening around the throat of the local library: first national and provincial government attempting to standardise the offerings across large areas encompassing many towns, and abrogating to itself the power to run the libraries, and to (mis) allocate resources among them according to bureaucratic whim. Then constraints on their ability to raise funding and making them subject to funding allocations from taxpayer money. (Not to mention the most appalling restrictions on what titles could be carried for many decades, this aspect thankfully now a lot less restrictive). Then, in more recent times, successive budget cuts leaving it with an ever-declining ability to continue viably ( oh, and volunteers cant work there even if they want to - it has to be staffed by centrally-paid government employees with no personal interest or passion for books and knowledge).
Limited funding is now 'allowed' to be raised through collections, and there is a community grouping known as 'friends of the library', who attempt to source donations of books and the like. But the problem there is that even if books are donated to the Fish Hoek library, there is nothing stopping the Provincial library Service ( government) lifting those books and sending them to another library elsewhere if it deems Fish Hoek to have a surplus of books.
Upshot: initial bona fide comunity initiative, once up and running successfully, will inevitably be absorbed, or at least interfered with, by the state. Same as the fate awaiting any successful NGO, anywhere.
thats why.
Published: April 18, 2006 6:57 AM
ted roberts
David, I bet it used to be that way here in the USA, too. BG, that is, (Before Government). Everything the govt touches becomes rulebound, costlier, and larger. Thanks for your bit of history. ted
Published: April 18, 2006 8:49 AM
R.P. McCosker
Let's not forget how government ("public" -- how benign that sounds!) libraries have effectively put the once-burgeoning cyber café trade out of business by installing "free" p.c.'s.
And now they're working on putting VHS/DVD rental stores out of business too by the "free" lending of *those* items.
Just as they did, so long ago, destroy commercial book rentals and private cooperative libraries.
I plan to read that Straight Dope link cited above for the history. But I recall that steel magnate and misbegotten philanthropist Andrew Carnegie had some role in this. Apparently he donated many huge, lush buildings to large American metropolises as "public" libraries on the condition that those municipalities then assume the continuing expense and administrative responsibilities of same. Predictably the governing classes leapt to take advantage of this ill-conceived "generosity," leaving hapless taxpayers saddled with this expense ever since, and the commercial book rental industry decimated.
Published: April 19, 2006 12:59 AM
R.P. McCosker
I learned from The Straight Dope that the first government ("public") libraries in America began in New England. No surprise there. That's where the socialist government ("public") schools began too, as well as all manner of movements in America aimed at destroying property, decentralism, and limited government.
Published: April 19, 2006 1:28 AM
david Chaplin
RP Mc cosker: Let's not forget how government ("public" -- how benign that sounds!) libraries have effectively put the once-burgeoning cyber café trade out of business by installing "free" p.c.'s.
And now they're working on putting VHS/DVD rental stores out of business too by the "free" lending of *those* items.'
No worry in my view - in my corner of the woods, those who can afford to use cyber cafes continue to do so - there, they get coffee, eats, and an altogether nicer experience, and no censorship of web content. The only people who use the library's pared-down offering (in spooky, hushed silence) silence are those whose only other option is no online activity at all.
And my local video shops ( at least 12 within a 5 km radius of my house) continue to thrive, as the library's free offerings only contain mouldy old stretched tapes , and nothing that was released within the last 5 years. No competition!
Published: April 19, 2006 2:07 AM
R.P. McCosker
david Chaplin:
Well, in my corner of the woods the cyber cafés were indeed put out of business. There used to be many places where you could go to have coffee and pay a small fee to rent time on p.c.'s. No longer. Sure, Starbucks and the like have ways you can plug in your laptop, but most people don't have laptops, even here in the San Francisco Bay Area. (And, even among laptop owners, they aren't always carrying their laptops with them.)
Published: April 19, 2006 1:40 PM