Kevin Myers at The Independent wonders, “If we have free books, why not free concerts or free theatre?” (Link via SF Signal.)
Except, y’know, we do have those things. I don’t know how much of these arts are subsidized by the government and taxpayers in the UK, but these are not crazy socialist concepts.
Myers goes on to write:
Now, only a baboon would deny the usefulness of free libraries to children. But why should any well-paid person like myself have their literary tastes paid for, including author royalties, by the taxpayer? Meanwhile, the bookshop down the road has to match the range of taxpayer-funded facilities being provided free of charge at the library, and make a profit, a concept about as foreign to a state-run lending library as toilet paper is to a fish.
I don’t know where to start with this. Maybe with the fact that not every tax-payer is well-paid, or at least can’t afford the discretionary funds that are needed for buying lots of books? That libraries tend to encourage book sales rather than the opposite by allowing readers to discover new authors? That you’d be hard-pressed to find a publisher, much less an author, who doesn’t support and often make use of libraries? Or that hey, your taxes go to pay for a lot of things you may never directly use but that other citizens use quite a lot. That’s sort of how taxes (and a society) work.
Are we really at the point where we’re arguing not just for less spending on arts but on scrapping the whole concept of public libraries?