A Stitch in Haste

One Florida municipality is forced to ponder the question:

Treasure Island residents might be paying $100 for library cards within the next few weeks.

City commissioners do not want to contribute more than $100,000 to the Gulf Beaches Public Library. Vice mayor Bob Minning says that is part of a shift in budget philosophies.

“We’re trying to make it a user-based approach” he explained, adding “We’re raising our fees for tennis, we’re raising our fees for golf, we’re raising fees to people who want to rent out the community center, boat slips that city has.”

If Treasure Island does not contribute to the Gulf Beaches Public Library then its residents will no longer be entitled to free library cards. They will have to buy one for $100 each year.

The town where I grew up had a (nominal) line-item “library tax” assessed with the property and water taxes. That’s certainly more intellectually honest than merely funding the library out of general revenues. But it still represents an overt battle-of-factions transfer of wealth from those who use the library to those who don’t.

(Incidentally, which is the more likely direction of that redistribution: from higher-income to lower-income, or vice versa? In most middle-class suburban communities, I would suspect that the latter is more likely. Who has more time to read library books: single moms or soccer moms?)

Going back to first principles: Libraries are, in strictly economic terms, not public goods, since they are perfectly excludable. They are so-called “club goods,” excludable but nonrivalrous (to a point). Without more, there is no basis for the government to provide (or, for that matter, rate regulate) any club good. See, e.g., my posts on municipal wi-fi.

So question next becomes: Is there a “more” that might legitimize government getting into the library business?

One possibility might be an externality-based argument: As with primary and secondary education, perhaps one person’s use of a library benefits everyone, via increased literacy, education etc. But that’s really an implausible stretch. Children have their own libraries at school, adults can access educational resources and research materials via the Internet, etc.

Or perhaps a public library has a “civilizing effect” on a community, like a large public park: a place where people from different backgrounds can meet and mingle and learn how behave amongst themselves. Again, is that — Shh! Quiet Please! — a realistic proposition?

Finally, a public library can be, and often is, viewed less as a “repository of books and periodicals,” and more as a “humane zone.” A place where the indigent, the homeless, the elderly, the disaffected the lonely, etc., can congregate — be part of society — without stigma. Fair enough, but we already have senior centers and community centers (not to mention malls, bookstores and Starbucks). Do we need heavily subsidized government libraries on top of that?

Finally, note the crowding out effect that today’s typical public library imposes on third parties. It’s one thing to suggest that encyclopedias, atlases and periodical archives might be a public good (with emphasis on the “might be”). But are, e.g., DVD rentals? Why should a public library be able to expropriate business from Netflix, Blockbuster and similar firms? And are we sure that libraries couldn’t be provided by not-for-profit organizations, no different than hospitals, schools and other civic facilities? After all, the first great public libraries in America were private, charitable institutions.

The local public library is too small to warrant much libertarian ire. Point conceded. It takes an overlay — such as calls for books to be banned from them — for libertarians to take note (and usually the libertarians will defend libraries to the extent that they are standing up to bigots). But again, a private library would be free to tell bigots to take a hike; there would be no debate in the first place. It is precisely the blurring of the line between public and private that makes such skirmishes increasingly frequent. (More on that in a future post.)

One last observation:

We’re raising our fees for tennis, we’re raising our fees for golf, we’re raising fees to people who want to rent out the community center, boat slips that city has.

I lambasted the notion of the municipal golf course here. The question becomes what, if anything, warrants exempting the public library from similar criticism.

(Post Script: Just to be clear, what’s happening in this story is that City A has been paying City B $100,000 per year to let residents of City A use City B’s public library and is now considering terminating the subsidy. I don’t think that in any way changes the general analysis, however.)

Previously:
–The Slippery Slope Slide of Club Goods
–Why Should There Be Municipal Golf Courses?
–San Francisco Mayor: Free Wi-Fi a “Civil Rights Issue”
–Once Again: “Taxpayer-Subsidized” Does Not Equal “Free”