Public Libraries seem to be of great economic benefit to yourself (as well as myself), and arguably the general society.  I imagine a true free market would have a place for such institutions where current hindrance (taxes, regulation, and overhead) only make this possible through theft. 

Although a better alternative may present itself as well, I think your assumption that the only avenue to achieve affordable knowledge centers available to the public is through government may be shortsighted. 

Then again maybe our love of being able to read Hayek, or other novel works outside of mainstream bookstores profit structure is minimal and unsupported by the masses.  Should others be inclined to support our desires for our benefit?  I believe there may be a better solution.   

I'm with James.

Upon first reading of your comment, Copernicus (great handle, by the way!), I was initially inspired to simply write, "For the free market answer to your leftist Vancouver location, please see amazon.com.", but that would probably have been viewed as a flip, glib answer to a well-written message.

I see a few problems with your message, and admittedly, I know it's just a personal reflection on your part.

First, it's anecdotal, but sometimes anecdotal observations can illustrate worries that others have as well, so there's a need to address those worries as best one can.

Second, it's ironic that one should be arguing in favor of libraries to provide free market books in a society that generally tilts socialist. That's kind of recursive: "We need majority sanctioned theft in order to provide books that criticize majority sanctioned theft."

Third, and this goes towards what might be more widespread worries about markets, the gist of your message is that the Vancouver society is very leftist (so right!) and therefore, it's difficult to get anything catering to the minority viewpoint unless one goes to a library that doesn't shelve things based on what is popular in the society. This is actually a manifest indictment of libraries that ties in to what Rokon wrote and what was recorded for that audio piece. If the library is not shelving things that would be worthwhile to the society, then it is, clearly, harming society by extracting money from it for purposes other than those which the members of society woul choose for themselves. No amount of egalitarian "enlightment" can justify such waste and fraud. Also, if the library WERE shelving books in proportion to what society wanted, then it wouldn't have to forceably extract money from people to do it. It could simply operate in the market and let the members of society support it through their own payments, which would reflect their interests. Only the market can provide the feedback mechanism of profit and loss, and prices, which can indicate to a person stocking the shelves and ordering books how much to stock and order.

In a larger context, some worry that minorities would miss out if only the market were providing items for sale. But this is a fallacy. It is the market, based on its ability to find profit niches in limitless areas, that caters to even the smallest group. This is why Borders bookstores have magazines on walking, horror movies, porn, cooking, crocheting, weddings, music, tattooing, and politics, plus about a hundred other things, while libraries have a few magazines, and the USSR had Pravda. This is why the cereal shelves in the supermarket have corn flakes, wheat bran, fruit loops, cheerios, lucky charms, boo berry, etc., while school lunches have only a couple items for everyone. It's just not possible for government to cater to all the interests of society, while entrepreneurs, given their calculation of margins, can survive and prosper by providing even obscure items.

The drive to fulfill human interests leads market participants to supply what is wanted. This doesn't mean that the tiniest interest group will see its needs blossom into a huge market, but the free market does a much better job in providing those items and services than the government can, and it does do ethically, without using force. If the government were to try to fill those tiny minority niches, it could only do so in a proportion that did not reflect the proportional desires of society, which would mean that politicians were deciding for some that their interests would not be served in order to serve the interests of others. This is immoral, of course, and anti-economic.

To me, morality and economics are one in the same. I know it's not popular in Vancouver, but I bet the people at the Fraser Institute agree! :-)

Thanks, Copernicus. Slight difference of opinion, but I hope what I wrote seems to make sense. You probably already have a lot of that covered anyway, I suspect! Take care!

Gard and James

Thanks for taking the time to reply. I always enjoy the temperate and good natured discussion I get here. It’s also a refreshing change for me to debate libertarians rather than the usual squidgy social democrats in my neck of the woods.

Gard, I’m glad you didn’t take the low road with the flippant Amazon remark, because that would have meant you hadn’t read my message. I rather addressed that option at length: not only saying it wasn’t useful for the actual situation, but there was a far dearer price extracted by reliance upon online ordering of specialized books. (Well, I guess specialized books will always need to be specially ordered, the problem is how narrow the non-specialized category is getting.) As an aside, if you were going to resort to a flip remark, telling me to move away from Vancouver might have been a little more biting – and compelling.

Also, while I did start with an anecdote, I hope it was clear that, by the end, I was making a larger theoretical point, which, to reiterate, was that in too many matters of cultural and intellectual literature the market tends to privilege the lowest (or at least lower) common denominators – especially in places like Vancouver where commercial real estate is insanely expensive, but the overall population is not very large (compared to somewhere like New York).

Still, my heading may have misled both of you into thinking I was defending the status quo more than I had intended. I think James is quite right that there could be another alternative to the current public library model, though I don’t claim to know what it might be. But it’s well worth thinking about. If we could snap our fingers and simply make the public libraries disappear and become immediately and exclusively dependent upon booksellers, this would not be an improvement in the intellectual quality of the local culture. I acknowledge the validity of Gard’s criticisms of the public library as theft, etc. But that doesn’t solve the problem – and it is a real problem. Now, it may be more of a problem here both because Canada tends to be quite a bit more lefty and I think the culture and sensibility of the public library system in Canada may be more inclusive and ambitious than in the U.S.  But I’m betting that in many U.S. communities, the impact would be much the same.

As I say, I don’t have a solution, but I don’t think it’s a problem that serious libertarians can simply ignore. Thanks again for your thoughts.

Regards
Copernicus