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Sigh. I'm not quite sure how to respond to this, it comes across as selfish and staying in your ideological bubble. Libraries exist to serve a community. Young children aren't junkies and your assertion seems specious. Libraries aren't crack houses or heroin dens and using that as a reason to not support them is, well, far fetched.

You can ask libraries to get books you are interested in. Further you can request the books you want via the ILL (Inter Library Loan) System from around the country or the world. You get the value out of the library that you put into it.

People should be voting selfishly, who else is going to look out for your self interest? If most people do NOT think like him, then the library will stay. If most people do not want it , why keep it?

You can't run a government like this. Most people don't use most government services, yet the smaller number who do use them really benefit greatly from them. If we voted down all government services that <50% of people use then society ends up suffering greatly. Hell, most people don't even use firefighters; should we vote them down too?

We vote to fund firefighting because we all know we COULD make us of the service even if we haven't...this is still a self-interested vote

but in the case of firefighting, most cities could drastically reshape their emergency services to put much of what firefighters do in the hands of an emergency response office that is much cheaper to run. its no coincidence that firefighters make sure they are in the critical path of vehicle accident response etc...they realize that structure fires are vanishingly rare and they might otherwise see drastic cuts. there isn't any real reason why a fire truck should be responding to someone with mild whiplash in a rear-ended vehicle (and no, the reason isn't because the vehicle might spontaneously combust).

No one is saying that we should vote down all services that aren't used by <50% of the population. My only point is that decisions are democratically valid if they're ratified by the majority.

The majority of people deciding to have libraries is just as democratically legitimate as the majority deciding not the have libraries.

People should be voting for what's best for society as a whole. Sure, consider your own interests as part of that, but "I make $200k therefore people making $200k should get tax breaks" is a pretty shitty way to be.

> it comes across as selfish

this is how voting is supposed to work - you vote YOUR interests.

libraries are one of these things nerds get excited about but don't use. I would be surprised if 5% of HN readers have checked a book out of the library in the last five years.

I fund, like and visit my local library but wouldn't see its closure as a sign of the end-times.

I would be surprised if 5% of HN readers have checked a book out of the library in the last five years.

Sure, I might not have checked out a book in the last five years, but I use my local library probably once a month. Libraries are much more than places to borrow books.

But you're paying for the books. If you want a community meeting hall with internet access, it can be run much more cheaply

> I might not have checked out a book in the last five years, but I use my local library probably once a month

How do you use a library while not using books it hold?

Before moving to very-much-big-city, my very-much-not-big-city library had:

* nice meeting rooms we used for interest group meetups and community organizing (of the "pick up litter" variety)

* copies of TAOCP and of Bourbaki (pro tip: tell your librarians what you want!)

I never checked out TAOCP but I'd always show up to meetings an hour early to meetings and read a section. Also a good way to spend a cold Saturday. Made it through a good chunk.

You can read books without checking them out.

> this is how voting is supposed to work - you vote YOUR interests.

Of course it isn't. I'm a man, one could make the argument I have no reason to vote for maternity leave, legal and safe abortions, equal pay. But I'd vote for it each time because it provides a better society for people I have no relation with.

Your view of voting is just a reflection of your own selfishness, not a definition of the idea of political participation. Many people vote for something more than pragmatic concerns.

I'm not sure if most people know that the first libraries in America were privately funded subscription services, established by Benjamin Franklin. The first American lending library (Library Company of Philadelphia) was set up in 1731, where it operated for literally over 100 years as a private institution, and exists to this day as a nonprofit. The first taxpayer-funded public library was established 102 years later, in 1833 (New Hampshire Town Library). The optional market good served its clientele better than the non-optional public service for over 100 years.

From the Revolutionary War to 1800, when the national government was in Philadelphia, the Library Company also served as the Library of Congress. Until the 1850s it was the largest public library in America. All of the books the Library Company acquired year by year over more than two and a half centuries are still on its shelves, along with many others added since it was transformed into a research library in the 1950s. In the 21st century, the Library Company serves as a resource for a variety of readers, from high school students to senior scholars, from novelists to film producers, and anyone else with an interest in our collections.

https://librarycompany.org/about-lcp/

Nah, the rich were only able to afford libraries. Now that they are "free (with taxes of course)," anyone can use it. You can use the same logic for school. You want schools to be paid? Okay, then the poor wouldn't be able to afford anything and they are stuck in a ever-looping hole of poverty.

According to this it is a non-profit corporation open to the public. A corporation is just a legal structure around ownership interest. The corporate shareholder structure allowed the shareholders to collectively share their books in the library which they provided to the public. Nothing about being exclusive to the rich.

Income is a continuum. Schooling (not to be confused with education) at its essence is just a room with a teacher, pupils and study materials. It can be realistically attained by nearly all income levels but the extreme lowest.

The library may not be valuable for you, but it is valuable for many. I see poor children using the computers. Even if a few learn programing and start their own companies instead of selling crack, then the library would pay for themselves. As fort the viewpoint, pressure your library to add more conservative stuff. As for security and junkies, why aren't you doing anything? Go volunteer yourself. Many junkies are actually desperate themselves. I actually read a lot of conservative stuff myself to ground myself. Why don't you?

It seems to me like the real value in a library these days is in the computers. Somewhere you can go to use one if you don't own one, or if you need to print or fax something. I'd be fine with all the books being digitized and libraries being more like just community cybercafes with no cost overhead for the skills of a librarian or keeping around books.

That's a horrible idea. Books are still extremely valuable for providing information in a distraction free medium. Books should not be underrated.

> My county library system has 2,038 books of and about feminism and ~300 books of and about LGBT issues, but it has scarcely anything about conservative / right wing political philosophy or Abrahamic theology.

Since it seems you counted every book in every library in your county and classified them according to left/right political ideology, and were able to come up with a precise number for books "of and about feminism," why aren't you also providing the same for " conservative / right wing political philosophy or Abrahamic theology?" Or for that matter, the books which fall into neither category?

That's just bad statistics.

>It doesn't have a single book by Machiavelli, Hobbes, Evola, or Carl Schmitt.

Bullshit. I refuse to believe you counted ~2,338 items of "feminist" literature in a library system that doesn't contain at least one copy of The Prince.

>The library doesn't seem like a service that's open to everyone, it seems like a subsidiary for a specific viewpoint and agenda.

It does seem that's what you want us to think, sir or madam green account created specifically for this thread.

>Since it seems you counted every book in every library in your county and classified them according to left/right political ideology

I didn't. I just queried the search engine.

>Or for that matter, the books which fall into neither category?

Because I don't really care about those books. I'm only interested in books about conservative / right wing political philosophy and/or Abrahamic theology. My library doesn't have many of those, however, it has a lot of books of ideologies that are hostile to the ones I'm sympathetic to.

When I'm not accommodated in a public place, I tend to look around to see who is. I can see why leftists love libraries, they're welcome to that opinion. I'm just going to vote in a way that's contrary to continuing financial support for those libraries that don't accommodate myself or my interests.

>My library doesn't have many of those, however, it has a lot of books of ideologies that are hostile to the ones I'm sympathetic to.

I have a difficult time believing you, partly because libraries don't actually serve a leftist or feminist agenda, and therefore the situation you describe is dubious, and partly because in another comment you mention "all men are bad feminist literature" which is a straw version of feminism promulgated by redpillers, incels and trolls.

So please mention the county you live in so we can do our own searches and verify the feminist/liberal/anti-right wing agenda for ourselves.

>I'm just going to vote in a way that's contrary to continuing financial support for those libraries that don't accommodate myself or my interests.

Do what several commenters have suggested and ask them to get the material you want, or don't go there.

Why do you feel libraries which don't "accomodate" you, personally, also don't deserve to serve the rest of the community?

>Why do you feel libraries which don't "accomodate" you, personally, also don't deserve to serve the rest of the community?

My general view is that People can do what they want as long as they don't involve me. I have no problem with libraries, I just don't like them enough to want to pay for them and whenever the issue comes up, I'm going to vote to free myself from the burden of supporting things I don't want to support. If libraries become a place that's interesting to me, my personal feelings might change.

Also, I'm sympathetic to kids having access to books. Whenever I'm done with my books, I bring them to my neighborhood park's lending library. It's supported by people in the neighborhood and people can exchange books. It's a practical, low cost solution. Though sometimes my books upset my neighbors, but I don't see how "The Concept of the Political" is any more controversial than say "the Life and Narrative of Frederick Douglass"

You continue to dodge literally the only salient question in this thread: which county do you live in?

The rest of the conversation in this thread is built upon the IMO extremely implausible claims in your first comment.

There's good reason for us to simply not believe your claims. I wrote a Python script to search US library catalogs for Prince, Leviathan, the bible, and some standard texts on christian/jewish history. I didn't find a single library that doesn't have at least one out of three, and nearly all libraries with catalogs my script knows how to handle have a copy of both Prince and Leviathan.

Furthermore, nearly all of the libraries without these texts have the keyword "elementary" or "middle" in their names, which... yeah, Leviathan isn't exactly written at a fifth grade reading level.

e: I also searched library catalogs for the intersection of 2k+ books on category/keyword feminism and no copy of Prince. Zero results.

> >Since it seems you counted every book in every library in your county and classified them according to left/right political ideology

> I didn't. I just queried the search engine.

Liar. Provide the search engine URL if you dare and let us confirm.

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Unless you're in an exceptionally isolated part of the country, your county library is part of an inter library-loan system that can get those books for you. Requesting these books signals to librarians that they need to have those books on premise.

I'm surprised they didn't have any of Hobbes or Machiavelli's works, as they tend to be utilized by a lot of classes.

But for Evola or Carl Schmitt, I don't see that as anti-conservative in any sense as most conservatives/mainstream Republicans have largely embraced classic liberalism that Schmitt opposed. Evola is equally divorced from mainstream orthodoxy outside of the alt-right, which itself has little interest in its own philosophical underpinnings. His work is definitely worht a read if you want to understand the underpinnings of European neofascism but you're talking about pretty niche stuff here.

> It doesn't have a single book by Machiavelli, Hobbes, Evola, or Carl Schmitt.

Probably for the same reason you won't find Hitler's book in German libraries. Their ideas of immorality, absolutism, fascism and nazism simply lost against other, better ideas. Get over it.

If Carl Schmitt and Julius Evola lost, why did Barack Obama get away with using drones to execute American citizens? Why did the CIA and the Bush administration get away with using torture?

To be frank, I simply don't believe you.

What county do you live in?