Library Is No Place for Government... Except Funding Apparently

I rarely comment on a local story, but since this one so easily speaks to philosophical principles, I will do so this time. Monroe County Executive Maggie Brooks expressed her shock that downtown library patrons could view explicit porn over the Internet in plain sight of kids. She then took what is being characterized by many as the "grandstanding, heavy-handed" approach of threatening to pull the library's government funding (effectively threatening to shut the library down it seems) if they didn't tighten up their policy in this area.

A columnist in my town's local weekly paper, Benjamin Wachs, wrote a nice, sarcastic column on this issue. In it he defends free speech by noting that various individuals and groups will object to various items on the Internet as being profane, disgusting, against the will of their favored supernatural being, or otherwise not proper for children's eyes. He sites examples of controversial-in-some-quarters materials like websites that deny the holocaust, support groups for rape victims, abortion websites that have graphic depictions of medical procedures, sites that discuss birth-control or condoms, sites that show coffins of soldiers returning from Iraq, and sites that show cartoons of the prophet Muhammad. He ends by nicely upping the sarcasm even further:

The library says it's performing due diligence by making adults who want to override Web-content blockers use privacy screens on computers that are away from children's areas. But that's not good enough. It's the government's job to make sure that no one is offended, ever. If they can't do that, we shouldn't have libraries.

So kudos for Benjamin for a nice piece.

Except... I don't like the title of it at all: "Library is no place for government". This invites the obvious question, that Mr. Wachs doesn't address: isn't this entire problem -- of free speech, and what if any limits there should be on what people can view on the Internet using library equipment -- only a problem because we have government-funded libraries in the first place? It is quite odd to title a sarcastic column that implies that the government should get out of the library business (in that it should not be regulating the viewing of legal content in the libraries), but should stay in that business as a key source of library funding. Why not really argue for "no government in libraries" by noting the root cause of the problem, and by arguing for privately-funded, non-profit-run libraries in place of government-funded libraries?

Given the massive wealth in this country, I'm quite certain towns and cities across America would still have fine (better in some ways?) libraries, given the number of rich individuals who would love to have their names attached to the library building (e.g., "The Warren Buffet Library of Fairport" or whatnot). Or consider the increase in donations from the community that each library would undoubtedly get if we had much smaller government, with individuals keeping a much larger percentage of the money they have earned. Such a world would surely have far greater feelings of generosity, benevolence, and "charity" than the current one where people see that a service (libraries, post-office, welfare for the poor, you name it!) is a government service, so figure they are already paying for such things plenty through their taxes. In such a world, issues of free speech and censorship simply wouldn't arise: the libraries would be privately funded, and if people didn't like the policies of a library, they could frequent the next library over that had different policies. A "market" for libraries would of course arise, with competition for both the quality and quantity and of the materials provided as well as the policies in place for what is included, and what can be viewed by who and when.

I don't know for sure, but I assume Mr. Wachs is not in favor of cutting all government funding of public libraries. If so, then that is the obvious reason he wouldn't raise that issue in his column. But his column's title just begs for the question to be raised!