Please explain how the free market would give people free unlimited access to information, and culture.
A private library would be roughly the same as Blockbuster. Many, many copies of the books on the New York Times bestseller list and little, if any, older stuff. After all, it’s what the public wants, right?
Last year, I worked my way through the Left Behind series. It would not have been possible without my local library. For one thing, buying all of the books would have been cost-prohibitive, even used. For another, there were some books I would have had to buy new and I didn’t want to support the authors. In that respect, it’s no different from wanting to read Bill O’Reilly or Ann Coulter’s latest screeds. The library has paid for it so I don’t have to.
Robin
No, it’s not.
So your political philosophy is so greedy and cold hearted it’d vote to strip the poor of access to information and chances to better their life to save a couple dollars?
Yes it is. Taxes are the fee you pay to live in our society. Don’t like it? Move. You live here then you pay to help maintain it.
My political philosophy is devoid of, and is in no way connected to, assumptions of personal intent on the part of its citizens. No one needs to divine whether or not a citizen is
‘Greedy’
‘Cold hearted’
…etc. etc
in order to enact (or better yet, repeal) legislation. Or decide whether or not they are worthy of keeping their own hard-earned money.
If you think public access to information is a great way to improve the lot of the poor and needy, great. Fantastic. Knock yourself out. Go volunteer at the library, donate money to a local library foundation, improve the poor’s access to the Internet, newspapers and other sources. Whatever you want.
And try and convince me to do the same. Because I happen to believe you. I might join you and volunteer. I might write a check to help you. I might join the Board and get involved in fund-raising efforts just like you. Wouldn’t that be great? We could work together to raise funds to build a library, or free access to the Internet, or whatever we think (along with our donors) is the best way to accomplish our goals.
My political philosophy is based on the rule of law. Not the rule of judgement on someone else’s intent. Because the latter is irrelevant.
Your kneejerk reaction of attacking someone’s ‘intent and goodness quotient’, in response to a generic reaction I made a few posts above, is typical of the posters on this Board.
I made no comment about whether or not I think libraries are good. Or bad. Or are operated efficiently. Or not. Or whether I would like them to go away or continue to multiple.
I made a generic comment about how someone sort-of assumed the present state of taxation by government was the accepted standard, and then put the burden of proof on others to explain why they shouldn’t have their hard-earned money taken from force and spent by government bureaucrats. Instead of the other way around.
I am glad we have libraries, but I have some comments about your list.
Modern libraries, to my dismay, do not retain books that are not checked out, citing space limitations. They claim their reason for existance does not include archiving. My library regularly purges out of print books or ones that get checked out infrequently. Sad but true.
Very important in some places. Here’s a typical conversation with a friend of mine:
“Let’s mail {some important infomation} to all voters.”
Me: “Why mail? Just put it on a web page and save stamp money.”
“But nobody has Internet access, or if they do, it’s only dialup.”
“No problem. Just go to the library, where everyone has fast & free access.”
Our library doesn’t store more than 6 months of ANY magazines in paper form, but microfilm (soon to be online computer access only).
Libraries are good, but they have changed over the years. I’d say 80% of all patrons I see at our library are using the Internet. Not many are reading books or papers.
Books are available on Amazon only if you have money. And a computer at home.
Although I have the later, this past year I have barely been able to pay the rent and buy food (even with a productive garden this summer). I can’t afford to buy books. If it were not for my public library I would have no fresh reading material.
I realize you don’t see hordes of people sitting around reading in a library… that’s because we’ve checked our books out and taken them home to read.
Judging by the 2-3 wait for some of the new books I’ve had to queue up for in the past year I’m not the only one getting my fresh reading from the library.
Libraries are also neat in that they frequently have books that aren’t in print anymore, and will usually borrow obscure titles from other libraries if they don’t have a copy on hand.
That’s the nature of taxes. There’s no way around this. I would say a good 50% of the tax revenue goes on things I don’t use or support, but that doesn’t mean it should never be supported at all.
If you wish, you can choose to pretend the small percentage of your money that currently goes to libraries can instead be additional revenue for something you do use, like Schools or Emergency Services or whatever.
Libraries provide a useful service. They’re still popular. We wouldn’t have gotten this far without them. What’s the big deal?
How do you know the first three sentences of your last paragraph are correct?
According to the 2000 census the philly population is about 1.5 million. Doing a quick calc with windows calculator. Divide that by 54 and you get 27,777.7777… served on average by each library. Lets round that down to 27,776 Now since closing down 11 libraries saves 8 million dollars 8,000,000/11 should give the cost for keeping one library open. Win calc gives the answer as $727272.72727272727272727272727273 lets round that up to $727,272.73
Okay so $727,272.73 is the cost to serve 27,776 people with a library. Dividing that the individual cost per person is $26.18349402361751152073732718894. Lets be bold and say $27 dollars.
Is $27 dollars alot of money? Depends on your life situation, but with the costs of things these days it’s a drop in the ocean for most people. Basically the cost of a trip to the movie theater.
Personally, I’d much rather have a literate citizenry. I’m not going to object to my tax dollars going towards making people more informed.
You’re either 1) rich or 2) don’t read very much. I check out about 3 books a week from my library. There’s no way I could ever afford to buy that many books. And even if I could, it seems wasteful to buy a book that I only want to read once.
Your calculations assume every citizen is ‘served’ by the library. I have no way of knowing the number of unique person-visits to a Philly library, but 1 in 100 wouldn’t seem to be too far off as a starting guess. From reading the posts on this thread alone I would guess the figure is about 1 in 5 to 1 in 10, and that’s for an extremely literate, active population with a demonstrated selection bias to participate in a discussion on libraries.
If you take that assumption and plug it into your numbers above, suddenly you’re up to $2700 per patron, per year, for a library system. That does sound like a lot of money…a hell of a lot, actually… and extremely inefficient, to boot.
Give the $27 back to each taxpayer. Cut that $2700 figure by 90% to $270 per year, per ‘needy’ citizen. Raise those funds through voluntary means and provide Internet access and other channels to promote literacy to the poor. You may be able to convince large private repositories of books (e.g. Amazon, Barnes and Noble) to provide tax-deductible donations of books, or to scan out-of-print books, or whatever.
That’s just one idea in 60 seconds. If you are that passionate about this I suggest you start a Philly-based foundation immediately to replace the vital service performed by the Philly libraries.
I’m very literate, and I’ve never used a community library. And I grew up poor.
I already mentioned that but forgot to add that many kids were just playing games. I would put a very stringent limit on that. Maybe set aside a very limited number of computers for games. It makes no sense that people are waiting to use the computers for moe important things while young people are playing games… I suppose the problem with that is that it is not so simple. Many are chatting or doing the facebook thing or whatever so it would have to be more like computers #1 to 3 can be used to play games, chat and everything else; Computers 4 to 10 can be used for everything, chat, etc but not games and computers 11 to 25 cannot be used for games or chat, only serious stuff. I suppose it is not easy to decide what is “serious”.
Our library has a reservation system for the computers and a limit on time (one-two hours). Plus, one or two computers that are 15 min limits/no reservations. There are specific computer libraries with more access. I live in a poor area, and there were some mornings when there were 5 or 6 people waiting at the door for computer access, but there is almost always one or two people in line with me when I go to get my books on hold. That is probably the best part of our system- the actual collection is not that great but I can get items requested and in my hands within a few days. So far, I haven’t come across a book (that I wanted) they did not have or could not get for me. The freedom of reading books with no initial investment has really brougth back the reader in me.
I’d say another reason is for kids. Even if kids’ parents can afford to buy them books, some of them maybe can’t be bothered. It’s a good way for a child to get turned onto reading and have access to books. Plus, growing up, I had a lot of good books recs from librarians–it was more personal than bookstores, for the most part. (Some bookstores are more personal, but if people are buying books online or at bigger stores, getting personal recommendations is probably less likely to happen.)
It’s library myth bustin’ time!
While this is true, if an out of print book continues to circulate, it will be retained. Librarians can’t keep everything because space is one of the few limits we have imposed on us. But there are measures in place to ensure that out of print books are available in some way before every copy of a book is discarded.
Complete myth. While Internet use is very popular at libraries, books are still the main focus when it comes to funding and circulation and will continue to be until I retire at the very least (hint, I’m 27 so I ain’t retiring for a good many years).
That’s cheating. Just because someone doesn’t use the library, doesn’t mean they don’t have access to the library. And everyone has access to the library.
While those are nice ideas, they would be much more expensive to run a library than it costs to run it now through tax money. Secondly, who do you think buys the majority of books in this country? Libraries. And if you take that away and expect the people we bought books from to give us books, there would be chaos.
This is… unrealistic to say the least. And slightly discriminatory to say more. Patrons constantly whine to me about kids using computers to play games when they have more important things to do. Their more important things usually boil down to YouTube or MySpace or checking personal ads. But at least its not games.
Well, that’s crap. The person playing games is doing something just as important as the person who wants to do something else. Everyone gets their allotted time on the Internet and what they do with it is their business. Placing limits in the way you suggest is extremely unpopular with librarians (and patrons) and is rarely done. Finally, the biggest players of games are middle aged women. Don’t get between a 40something woman and her Bejeweled, it’s not pretty.
I don’t even know where to begin with this post. But I’ll give it a try, and then call it a day. I’m sure you will all be relieved.
I also theoretically have ‘access’ to a waterpark in Des Moines, a bike trail in Orange County, Ca, the Bridge to Nowhere, subsidized ethanol, artificially distorted home mortgage rates (at least for the past 10-15 years, anyway), the wonderful services of the Federal Dept of Education, the Dept of Labor, Medicare, Social Security and the national helium reserve.
I do not want nor care to have access to those things. If I did, I would be happy to pay the going rate. I do not want nor care to have access to the local library, and therefore do not want to pay $27 per year (or whatever the local rate is) to support it.
I will be happy to listen to a sales pitch, or an appeal to volunteer, or whatever a local ‘literacy foundation to help the needy’ wishes to put upon me. And then make a judgement about whether or not they will use my donation wisely, and decide accordingly about whether to give.
You, my friend, are the classic definition of a special interest. It sounds like your livelihood depends on the existence of libraries. That’s great. Go out and sell your wares and expertise. See if anybody is buying. They might be. Including me. More power to you. But don’t spin a tale of how your job is a ‘vital public interest’ and therefore take my money by force to support yourself.
How do you know it would be more expensive to run a library via private means? Give it a shot and find out. There may be many, many other business models available to ‘help the needy’ other than building a nice brick building across from City Hall and paying to heat and light it every day. The private-funded approach would force those new ideas and models to the surface. You would be forced to acheive your end goals (in this case, helping the un-literate needy) as efficiently as possible. Your self-interested attachment to the status-quo, whether done intentionally or through your sub-conscious, is grotesquely obvious in your post.
Your comment that the majority of book-buying (that is, >51% of all national bookselling revenues) in the country is done by libraries doesn’t pass the smell test. You might be right. But I’ll do the Scrabble ‘challenge’ here and either throw the red flag on that one.
And as for ‘chaos’ erupting if there weren’t libraries buying books. Jeezus. Give me a break. Yes! Yes! We must have libraries or chaos will erupt! There will be armed revolt! People will take to the streets! Give us libraries, they will shout, or a coup d’etat will be next!
It is also “discriminatory” that the lbrary does not subscribe to Playboy magazine nor does it allow guys to be jerking off while they view porn on the computers.
It is not for me or for you to say what is important or what the priorities are, it is for the taxpayer who foots the bill and I believe most taxpayers are more willing to support learning and job-searching than playing games. As you can see there are questions about spending money on libraries. I am afraid telling people they need to spend money so kids can play games on the computers may not be the best strategy to gain support.