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.
