> the valorization of profit has blinded them to seeing the advantages of the public good as a worthy bottom line
This is, IMO, the critical line, and also one of the deepest problems in the world (and especially America).
A focus on profit is so frequently completely opposed to human wellbeing and a flourishing society. Just look at health insurance companies for a prime example: they make profit by denying claims. The result is a catastrophically expensive insurance bureaucracy and worse health outcomes. Not to mention the extreme stress any American feels when interacting with an insurance company over any meaningful amount of money. (Which I’ve experienced, and I have far better coverage than the average American.)
These companies are so clearly, obviously bad for human flourishing. But profit is great!
The incentives are so deeply messed up. Our economy only allows profit as an incentive, which works well when aligned with human wellbeing-being. But as the economy grows, companies consolidate, and profit growth is still expected, nearly every single sector looks for ways to cut costs. And with fewer competitors, it’s easier and easier for entrenched, powerful companies to raise prices and reduce quality with little consequence.
This is clearly bad for human flourishing. But profits are fantastic!
Just because profit is actually aligned with human flourishing in a couple sectors doesn’t mean the system as a whole will continue scaling effectively. It’s clearly not, and it must change to avoid completely suffocating us.
I would argue that greed is the problem, not profit.
One could argue that government policies are anything but altruistic. They fund public education because you need an educated workforce. They fund public health insurance because a healthy workforce is a productive workforce. You distribute the cost over the entire population. Both remove direct costs from employers (e.g. training and providing private health insurance). Both have a tendancy to reduce costs and improve consistency because you are working at a larger scale. It also creates order in society since people generally feel as though more of their needs are being met, and they feel less exploited. All of this contributes to profit both on a social scale and for individual businesses.
Somewhere along the line people forgot the lessons of the 20th century. They forgot that profit goes beyond a line on the current financial statement. It also reflects long term interests.
Human nature (greed) is never the problem, because it cannot be changed. Focus only on what can be changed. Design a system that manages human nature, pointing it in a direction that is beneficial, while taming its side effects.
A denial of human nature is how you get authoritarian socialism with centralized planning, which leads to catastrophe because of the local knowledge problem, and because people have no private incentive to do anything.
"Capitalism" is an incomplete first step towards a system which channels greed into something that's beneficial for all stakeholders. A profit-driven actor making their production more efficient to increase profits is a good thing for everyone.
But capitalism is incomplete because the profit-motive can become pathological. Market failures are commonplace.
The only solution that is proven to work is a mixed economy done right, with clever and lean regulations, and a government not influenced by money, and with the government stepping in occasionally to provide public goods that the market cannot, and with private actors otherwise free to make profits as long as they are not harming any third parties.
>I would argue that greed is the problem, not profit.
I would point out that's precisely what the "private equity firm"--is that true or just a buzzword? no private equity group is taking this library private--is saying about the current library, that the greed of the unionized employees is running the library for their own benefit and at great cost to library and at the expense of the public, and it could be run more efficiently. So, you agree with them at least that much.
>Somewhere along the line people forgot the lessons of the 20th century. They forgot that profit goes beyond a line on the current financial statement.
huh? that wasn't "the lesson of the 20th century". if anything, the 20th century represents democracy and market capitalism's greatest joint achievement, with much less disease and starvation and much more freedom at the end vs the beginning.
you live in one of the greatest times to be alive, and all you can do is complain. when and where from the past would you rather live out your life expectancy of half what it is now, coupled with no HN to bitch on?
Totally agree. I think another angle to look at it is not "a couple sectors" but "a certain scale", as suggested by your remark about how companies consolidate. When businesses are small and need every customer, they are motivated to do a good job at what they do, build goodwill, protect their reputation. The larger they become, the more they tend to work against their customers rather than for them. They cross multiple markets, making them less responsive to the demands of any one. They become "too big to fail". And so on.
What we see in the modern era is a system in which success is defined as becoming large enough that your customers have no other option but to deal with you. That's not a healthy system.
You see that scale problem everywhere. Once a business has become large, it no longer cares about “small” costs like unused buildings. That’s basically the reason so many buildings in towns and cities can be left unused for decades.
The impact it has on that town is often huge. But for the business, it’s just a small overhead. A small landlord couldn’t afford to leave their asset unproductive. A multinational conglomerate can.
The death of local high streets is in part due to the unwillingness of landlords to actually rent their properties out for market rate.
> Just look at health insurance companies for a prime example: they make profit by denying claims.
Ok but why do people pick those insurance companies?
We see this across the board too and not just insurance companies. Governments low to pick the lowest bidder who then has massive cost overruns which has to put them above the second lowest bid in the end. Why is counter party risk never accounted for?
Germany has a different structure for company ownership than the USA. Members representing relevant stakeholders (employees, the community, environment, etc.) must be present on the board and advocate for their interests.
UBI would go a long ways to enforcing democracy. Money talks, so just give people money. Everything else is too abstract. We can't seem to encode justice into law but at least if everyone got UBI it would be harder to oppress poor people
It’s not difficult, it’s impossible under freedom of religion and just independent thought generally.
One person’s “well being” might be measured by how many wives and children you have. Another’s might be education level and physical fitness. Another’s could be financial independence.
These all clash with each other in fundamentally incompatible ways.
> And with fewer competitors, it’s easier and easier for entrenched
so the problem isn't with profit after all, it's with low competition? So what is causing the lack of competition in the sector? Why can't that problem be fixed?
Public-private "partnerships" backed by private equity will always raise prices, cut costs arbitrarily, reduce service, take out loans, and saddle the organization with debt to pay themselves huge dividends before driving it into bankruptcy. This is what happens when corrupt, unregulated capitalism is allowed to run amok and have zero skin in the game except to extract maximum profit like vampires.
Health insurance isn’t a great example. Profits are capped relative to premium costs so denying claims isnt a good strategy.
The only way denying claims can become a profit booster is to deny enough that premiums can be lowered enough to bring over more new members than was lost in revenue through the premium discount.
So denied claims come from people shopping for the cheapest insurance coverage possible.
Conceptually neoliberal societys do not have a strong way to seperate community and social goals from economic ones, because their very philosophy is that prosperity creates social improvement.
Meanwhile everyone is living in low trust economic zones with no community observable, other than anonymous services.
1) Americans spend less than OECD average out of pocket as a percentage of healthcare costs. This is much larger in absolute terms but the multiplier - cost of healthcare is nearly entirely due to provider costs.
2) Health outcomes are really different between states despite having basically the same system. demographically controlled iirc outcomes are not different and sometimes better (e.g. japanese americans).
3) Insurance company profits are pretty low relative to cost of healthcare. while the bureaucracy is more expensive its not "catastrophically" by any means and iirc there are oecd countries with similar overhead although im too lazy to search on myvphone.
4) Rationing healthcare has to and does happen in all advanced economies. again modulo cost in the us, id rather it happen via money than government or inforrmal scarcity (like in Canada).
4a) Frankly while i dont have evidence for this 4a, lookinng at us spending by age (and eg the enormous money usg spends on kidney dialysis for people thay mostly just die in a few years anyway), I wonder if an important reason US providers are so expensive is, we ration limited supply properly for most people but then don't ration keeping a bedridden grandma alive for 6 more months at extreme cost, cause hey, the govt pays.
> Just look at health insurance companies for a prime example: they make profit by denying claims
Despite being from Europe, I find this to be a shocking and erroneous interpretation.
Clearly, health insurances have the duty to allocate limited resources (“premiums”) across members. Denying and accepting claims is the mechanism to that end. Accepting all claims would increase premiums and reduce membership (by pricing people out). Would that an ideal state? Clearly not.
Healthcare debates in the United States are difficult because so many assume that insurers have very high profit margins and that arbitrarily denying claims is the reason they have high profit margins.
If you look at the actual profit margins it’s low single digit percentages. You could eliminate profits altogether and virtually nothing would change. We even have non-profit insurers to look at
It’s strange how the high prices of drugs and services aren’t drawing the ire of people who complain about costs. Drug prices are nearly 3X higher here than international averages and doctors here also earn a lot more with in many cases fewer restrictions on prescribing or offering services than in most EU countries.
The meme that insurance company denials are generating huge profits comes mostly from the public murder of a health insurance CEO last year. For some reason people assumed that insurance companies and their profits must therefore be the core problem with high costs, without making the effort to see where the money actually goes in our health care system.
As you said, there is no health care system which does not have approval processes, deny requests deemed unnecessary, require step therapy, and establish standards of care.
While the critique is valid, that does not offer a path to the solution.
Utilitarism is the ruling moral philosophy, and the only possible countermeasure is externalities but that depends on an effective government which is even more unlikely that asking for ethical behavior to corporations.
That may be widely believed but there are plenty of government institutions that actually function well. Libraries are a good example.
What’s more: the belief in govt “inefficiency” is one of the hardest to overcome factors that makes it hard to build good institutions, leading to a vicious cycle.
Public utilities and services are the default and work well in the majority of developed countries. This is true for everything from local transport to water distribution. As the joke says "universal healthcare is so difficult to get right that only all developed countries except the US have managed to put it in place".
> Just look at health insurance companies for a prime example: they make profit by denying claims.
This has been repeated so many times that I think people don’t understand just how small the profit margins are for health insurers. Low to middle single digit percentages. As low as 2-3% in recent years, and much lower than the average S&P 500 corporation.
There are also non-profit insurance companies out there. Their rates are not appreciably different, as you’d expect after seeing how low the profit margins are in for-profit insurers.
I also think people don’t realize that countries with nationalized health care also deny procedures, have pre-approval processes, require step therapy, and will not authorize procedures they don’t believe to be medically necessary or to have enough evidence. There is no health care system in the world which will simply approve and pay for every request.
So while health insurer profit margins are convenient bogeyman, if you deleted their profits entirely from the system it wouldn’t move the needle on costs. It also wouldn’t open the floodgates for approving everything, because no health care system will allow unlimited services. The amount of excess and unnecessary care would be astronomically expensive. I do agree that we need a more robust system in place for ensuring that incorrect denials don’t happen, but health insurance profit margins are barely a blip on the overall cost of health care in the United States.
It’s a combination of high prices for services, American’s unusually high utilization of health care services, and very high rates of drug prescribing that mostly contribute to the cost. I think most Americans would be surprised to discover that a lot of nations with nationalized health care would also be restrictive in their access to many services and prescription drugs. For as much as we talk about insurance companies denying claims, Americans still get far more services and prescriptions than most of their counterparts in other countries.
i have no doubt that other countries have some problems in their healthcare systems too, but i think you are downplaying a few key points:
1) united healthcare made 90 billion dollars gross profit in the last 12mo, and that's only one health insurance company. claiming that it's not a great business at a 2-3% profit margin ignores the scale of money involved, and ignores that the customer for health insurance is truly captive.
2) you're right that america has very high prices in healthcare. doesn't it seem bad that private insurance companies are incentivized to make things cost as much as possible so they can skim that 2-3% off the top? insurance companies negotiate and set prices for services and pharmaceuticals. they now own the pharmacy benefit management companies that would normally be incentivized to negotiate for lower prices.
i would expect in a public health care system that rejects procedures, they would follow consistent guidelines and rules. american health insurance companies will arbitrarily reject a percentage of procedures that they know they should be accepting in order to keep their profit margin in the right range.
i think it's hard for me to see the argument that health insurance companies are a net-positive or even net-neutral party in the united states. i don't think it's a coincidence that we have some of the highest prices and some of the worst outcomes.
The insurer margins can be whatever small but when the same company also owns the hospital and drug distribution it doesnt matter.
Somebody in the process makes extreme margins.
Also americans cant be at same time avoiding going to hospital because of costs and “still get far more services than most of their counterparts in other countries”
Believe it or not there are countries where there is mandatory health insurance (your employer or you or state have to pay it) and doctors dont look at costs because they dont really know them. They for sure try to not be wasteful but nobody is second guessing obviously best treatment because it costs 40% more.
It astounds me how so many people can have such strong opinions about systems they have so little experience with.
I've lived long term in 4 countries (Canada, USA, Japan, Germany) and have dealt extensively with the medical systems in all of them (plus some experiences in Portugal and France).
Every system has its warts, and this is the first thing that naysayers will latch onto, of course. People love to use tu-quoque as a defense mechanism. "See? They're just as bad as we are because you have to wait sometimes, and look at this extreme case right here! It's probably even WORSE than us!"
The fact is, none of the systems are really that bad (with the EXCEPTION of the American system). There's a reason why travel insurance companies have two tiers: All of the world EXCEPT America, and all of the world INCLUDING America.
Have I had to wait for a procedure in Canada? Sure, but they do a pretty decent job of triaging, so yeah outside of the HORROR STORIES (of which you can find anywhere if you dig enough), it's pretty damn good. In Japan I paid a percentage of costs (which are pretty damn reasonable). In France I actually didn't have insurance, so I had to pay FULL price when I came down with pneumonia: 50 euros for the doctor and the antibiotics. In Portugal, I caught COVID, and got treatment within 2 hours of arriving at the hospital in Lisbon.
If you haven't actually been in the medical system of another country, you don't know what you're talking about.
> I also think people don’t realize that countries with nationalized health care also deny procedures, have pre-approval processes, require step therapy, and will not authorize procedures they don’t believe to be medically necessary or to have enough evidence
Lines in private medical care are shorter because people with no insurance don't get in line.
Interesting pattern here: manufacture a crisis (book banning complaints → funding cuts), then propose private "efficiency" as the solution. Meanwhile, this library was founded in 1799, is the second-oldest in Virginia, just won the 2024 state Library of the Year award, and had 400k+ checkouts last year. Hardly sounds broken.
I walk the corner to the rubble that used to be a library/
Line up to the mind cemetery now/
What we don't know keeps the contracts alive and movin'/
They don't gotta burn the books they just remove 'em
And they keep going for it: in France the neoliberal government is pushing further the privatisation of railroad (they ask the national company to invest in the shared infrastructure, but spare the competition from this burden; then they will probably point out how the private competitors are more cost efficient), subway and buses in Paris, they renew the private management of public funded highways despite them being a cash machine, they let the public hospitals understaffed to the point that many medium sized cities do not have 24/7 access anymore to emergency services, and now many colleagues and friends of mine prefer to go in private hospitals
In American politics, this has been an incredibly successful strategy, most notably starting with Reagan. It's called "starving the beast" [1]. The playbook is simple:
1. Cut taxes
2. "Pay" for those tax cuts by cutting expenditure;
3. Those programs begin to fail because of the funding cuts;
4. Use those failures to justify further cuts, usually by privatizing something or some form of public-private partnership, which is nothing more than a transfer of government wealth to the already-wealthy.
We saw something similar play out recently with Jane Street in India [2], which seems to boil down to market manipulation between options and the underlying securities.
Back in the 1980s we had corporate raiders who were famous for buying up companies that were trading below book value and then simply breaking them up for parts and selling those parts. I'm sure this went as far as corporate raiders manipulating the price.
Private equity is the latest form of this cancer. Here's the PE playbook:
1. Raise a bunch of money;
2. Buy some company with a large amount of debt, a so-called leveraged buyout ("LBO");
3. Once you control the company, take out massive loans on the company's assets;
4. Sell off any real estate holdings, often to some interested party who most certainly isn't at arms length, possibly for a discounted price, to raise further capital then lease back those holdings you need, ideally with complicated leases that hie the true future cost;
5. Use those loans to pay back the original investors and loans;
6. Sell the debt-ridden husk to whoever is stupid enough to buy it.
Now (6) is the tricky part because you have to make it look like the company is profitable, that you've added value by cutting costs or otherwise increased efficiency. And you do that with complicated debt. Sort of like ARMs in the subprime crisis.
I cannot think of a single success story with PE that has created a successful company that hasn't imploded. I belive most PE funds lose money too. Why anyone would buy a company that a PE fund has gotten its hooks into is beyond me.
I suspect you can make a market-beating fund that simply follows the index but does not buy any PE-infected company.
> Why anyone would buy a company that a PE fund has gotten its hooks into is beyond me.
From my own life experiences, I believe that, across a population, there is no correlation between the amount of money people have and their individual rational decision making ability.
> I cannot think of a single success story with PE that has created a successful company that hasn't imploded.
Safeway had a leveraged buyout in the 80s, and was so successful the merger/acquisition with Kroger was blocked due to monopoly concerns. Hilton also had a leveraged buyout.
PE exists to buy bargain bin companies and extract maximum value from them. Sometimes that’s actually rehabilitating the company. Usually they are just the best at milking a dying cow.
By this point, I suspect that PE is simply a sophisticated liquidation service. Where an owner doesn't want to deal with a company anymore and want to cash out, but can't just easily sell everything. By this perspective, any fault on a company's discontinuation lies solely with whoever sold it to a PE as it's him who actually wants to kill it.
"cannot think of a single success story with PE that has created a successful company that hasn't imploded. I belive most PE funds lose money too. Why anyone would buy a company that a PE fund has gotten its hooks into is beyond me."
It's funny that the narrative where a bunch of generally smart well connected people renowned for their greed set money on fire for decades doesn't make you rethink your priors.
It is worth noting that per the linked article below[0]. The library has a system for preventing readers under the age of 18 from accessing the books in the New Adult section of the library, and it's one that requires parents to opt into their child having access to those materials.
The library should serve the entire community, not a loud minority or even exclusively the majority. If 20% of the community wants LGBTQ books, 30% don't, and 50% don't care, why should the 30% be able to decide that the other 20% shouldn't have access to these books? The majority should not be able to strip rights that the minority should have access to. Tyranny of the majority is a real thing.
I find it hard to believe that even a plurality wants these books banned. Do we have proportions, or is it just a number of complaints?
It's the loudness of the minority that wants them banned. That, and the fact that they are often people who have enough privilege (land owning, ability to take off work to go to council meetings, and (most importantly) own a business) to be able to throw around to get there way.
Happens a lot at universities and non profits. A big donor will sometimes only agree to donate if certain conditions are met, and as a result can strong arm the other party into whatever they want. The public sector is the same; At the local level it's often business owners that have enough influence over the local economy.
And frankly, it’s a library. Every group should have access to books they’re interested in. But that doesn’t mean those groups should be able to ban books they don’t like, even if 75% of people want to ban them.
I honestly cannot understand how having LGBTQ books in a library even affects people who don't like them. Just don't read the books. It's not like their eyeballs are being glued open and they're being forced to read them. Book banners are such weirdos.
I'm curious how you would feel about your local library carrying The Turner Diaries, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or The Camp of the Saints? What percentage of the local population would have to want those books for you to believe the library should serve them?
Are there any books that a public community library should not be willing to carry?
I think that access to disinformation within a context such as a library is actually quite a good thing. You can read it, and then research it, and think critically about it. In an open ecosystem of information, with a little critical thought and media literacy, most people are able to spot bullshit when they need to.
Most University Libraries carry those text. I'm not sure if it would be particularly useful in the context of a public library (as the goal is to serve a local community with a wide range of needs). However, if there was interest then it would likely be put into circulation.
I would speculate that there was likely a time when each of those were on shelves, but they were likely weeded out due to lack of interest.
Do libraries carry Mein Kampf? Would the books you suggest be categorized and contextualized appropriately? (… like all other books, and a job that I believe librarians already perform.) "Categorized and contextualized appropriately" might also mean "not on the shelf / by request, but available for research"; a good many books that are considerably less objectionable and of greater literary value already are in libraries, as there is only so much shelf. Again, deciding what merits shelf space is a function of the librarian.
But you see no qualitative difference between {a book written by a white supremacist, neo-Nazi organization; a fabricated text (i.e., propaganda); and a book the SPLC describes as "'widely revered by American white supremacists' and 'a sort of anti-immigration analog to The Turner Diaries', and attributed its popularity to the plot's parallels with the white genocide conspiracy theory."} and "The book Pride Colors by Robin Stevenson, which explains the meaning of the rainbow colors in the Pride flag"[1]?
What is the literary value of white supremacist drivel or a fabricated text to a community library? (I'd wager approximately none.) Versus the books being complained about (anything and everything LGBTQ+). (Definite value from helping people exploring LGBTQ+ topics for themselves, simply trying to learn about LGBTQ people, to helping non-homophobic parents raise inclusive, tolerant children who don't want to spread hate & intolerance, and which need only be checked out by those who actually desire to read them.) There is demand for books of the nature being banned here; I cannot see there being anywhere near the same demand for books filled with bile.
And again, the empirical position (and for some subsets, outright stated position) of the right is to remove any and all traces of LGBTQ media from libraries. (And more broadly, from society, as well.)
In this particular instance[1], we can see this in one of the complaints:
> “Our library should not be carrying ANY material about LGBT,” one person wrote.
and,
> “Family has 2 moms — unacceptable,” the person wrote of another book. They also complained, “This book makes LGBTQ+ look ‘harmless’ and acceptable.”
Someone else points out exactly your quip; what about equal representation?
> She continued, “You said taxation without representation. What about my representation in the library? What about what I want my children to read? What about the 4 percent [of] LGBTQ members in your community that you represent that only get 1 percent of the books? Are they not being represented fairly with their tax dollars?”
In the broader national debate, we've seen this pattern endlessly; "protect the children" is a wedge to open a fissure towards a wholesale and complete ban. E.g., see the FL Don't Say Gay Act, which started as objections that education on such topics needed to be "age appropriate" but was then subsequently expanded until is was a wholesale ban on education of numerous topics.
Was it really adults trying to prevent other adults from those materials, or trying to prevent minors from accessing adult materials? (I'll interpret downvotes without response as confirmation of the latter, and that people want minors accessing adult material.)
> Was it really adults trying to prevent other adults from those materials, or trying to prevent minors from accessing adult materials?
This dichotomy is false. Many challenges were trying to prevent children and adolescents from accessing age appropriate materials. A number of challenges asserted the books were unsuitable for any age. Or called for the library to purge or destroy them.[1][2]
> (I'll interpret downvotes without response as confirmation of the latter, and that people want minors accessing adult material.)
Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.[3]
Who did you think would be impressed by an announcement you would interpret down votes in bad faith?
I increasingly think that our society isn't sustainable without some recalibration of the notion of responsibility, liability, justice and due process. The problem we face is that it is very easy for unscrupulous operators to exploit loopholes and cause lots of damage, but the process for holding them accountable faces a heavy burden of proof and itself can be exploited (e.g., by dragging out lawsuits for years).
We need some kind of sliding scale where certain actions by people who either "should have known better" (i.e., are exploiting insider knowledge) or "had no basis for acting" (i.e., are rich enough to not need to make any more money) can be quickly curtailed without a need to specifically prove everything that they did. Something loosely akin to "if you had a billion dollars, you'd better be able to affirmatively prove you did everything squeaky clean or we're just going to take $500 million".
Brendan Ballou’s book “Plunder” is an excellent read about the effects of private equity across industries, if you want to go deeper on the topic. I recently had him on my podcast talking about the effects of PE in HVAC. There are quirks in each realm but the themes are common (I guess in libraries, too).
You're accusing the article of being one sided, while espousing a view that to most on here is going to seem one sided. "They want to contract it out to a contractor." This completely leaves out that the contractor is also trying to get the transaction to happen, or at least to improve the likelihood.
So if some article offends your sensibilities enough to call it stupid, maybe give a more balanced take.
You're just getting confused by the article, it seems. Nowhere in the article does it make any specific claims about LS&S is "trying to get the transaction to happen", rather it makes vague begging-the-question claims that it's a "takeover attempt". It's probably a slick way to make people assume the conclusion was proved somehow, without actually doing it.
But, on another level, what in the holy name of my increasingly annoyed sensibilities are you even talking about? A contractor wants a contract? Did IBM bid on the healthcare.gov job? What did LS&S do that IBM didn't?
If the current public management is bad, the solution should be to bring in new public management. The fact that the alternative is private equity should be the indication that this fight is purely ideological rather than a fight against bad management.
Based on my experience with county boards of supervisors and their interactions with library management and library funding decisions, the Warren County Board of Supervisors' statement that the library has poor management shouldn't be given much credence unless backed up by evidence.
Somewhat amusingly, the library is a subordinate of the county. If the library is in fact poorly managed, the poor management is the fault of the board of supervisors.
It really depends on how "library of the year" is determined.
Some years back now, our local library got a new boss who was determined to do everything the new and modern way. In the process, the boss drove away half of the paid staff, I don't know what fraction of the volunteer staff, and the entire community support organization. But hey, those are all old people and their values clearly don't matter (who cares if they're the ones with tons of free time?). Help, I don't have the money or people to run programs anymore! Better run away and get another job. Now, the library still exists but a lot of people are going to the next town over, and the new new boss is struggling to rebuild from scratch.
It would be completely unsurprising if "do things the modern way" and "chases awards" are significantly overlapped without corresponding to "improves things for the actual users", and "support LGBT" is code for "gerontophobia".
I understand the concern about local accountability, and you're absolutely right that libraries should be responsive to their communities. But the data here suggests the broader community was actually supporting the library.
Most public libraries follow professional collection development standards that try to serve their entire diverse community including families who want those books available. It's a tough balance, but the goal is usually having something for everyone rather than letting any single group determine what everyone else can access.
The community seems to have spoken pretty clearly by successfully defending their library. Sometimes the loudest voices aren't representative of the broader sentiment.
Your comment is inline with how the libraries operate, and I can't tell if some of the others here are just a little homophobic or just woefully misinformed about how libraries function.
Books that aren't being circulated frequently enough get weeded and removed from the collection, usually once or twice a year. Moreover, if books are requested frequently from other branches, or have long hold times, then that volume will typically be added to a collection.
Billionaires buy elections, elected officials break funding for public facilities, billionaires get tax cuts, public facilities get bought out with tax cuts.
I wonder when they start introducing their own currencies like in the old mining towns.
Where did you get the idea it was already owned by private equity?
A public library delivers value to a community. Profit is not necessary for that, and can be argued to actually be harmful to delivering value to a community.
Efficiency might not deliver maximum value either when the community is the focus. Something taking a little more time or involving more human effort can actually be fulfilling for those doing and receiving. Firing the librarian that knows all the childrens' names so you can have a kiosk instead isn't delivering value.
Well, a subset at best. I've moved to a new town where the sole library is available to normal 9-5 workers for three hours on a Saturday morning. I don't even know what it stocks because it just isn't open when most people would be able to use it.
The library is owned by Samual Library Inc which is not the government or a public company.
Profit is not neccessary to deliver value, but it helps optimize it.
If someone knowing kids names is worth it people would be willing to pay more for the service. If people would rather pay less and use kiosks then that may be a better option.
> the valorization of profit has blinded them to seeing the advantages of the public good as a worthy bottom line
This is, IMO, the critical line, and also one of the deepest problems in the world (and especially America).
A focus on profit is so frequently completely opposed to human wellbeing and a flourishing society. Just look at health insurance companies for a prime example: they make profit by denying claims. The result is a catastrophically expensive insurance bureaucracy and worse health outcomes. Not to mention the extreme stress any American feels when interacting with an insurance company over any meaningful amount of money. (Which I’ve experienced, and I have far better coverage than the average American.)
These companies are so clearly, obviously bad for human flourishing. But profit is great!
The incentives are so deeply messed up. Our economy only allows profit as an incentive, which works well when aligned with human wellbeing-being. But as the economy grows, companies consolidate, and profit growth is still expected, nearly every single sector looks for ways to cut costs. And with fewer competitors, it’s easier and easier for entrenched, powerful companies to raise prices and reduce quality with little consequence.
This is clearly bad for human flourishing. But profits are fantastic!
Just because profit is actually aligned with human flourishing in a couple sectors doesn’t mean the system as a whole will continue scaling effectively. It’s clearly not, and it must change to avoid completely suffocating us.
I would argue that greed is the problem, not profit.
One could argue that government policies are anything but altruistic. They fund public education because you need an educated workforce. They fund public health insurance because a healthy workforce is a productive workforce. You distribute the cost over the entire population. Both remove direct costs from employers (e.g. training and providing private health insurance). Both have a tendancy to reduce costs and improve consistency because you are working at a larger scale. It also creates order in society since people generally feel as though more of their needs are being met, and they feel less exploited. All of this contributes to profit both on a social scale and for individual businesses.
Somewhere along the line people forgot the lessons of the 20th century. They forgot that profit goes beyond a line on the current financial statement. It also reflects long term interests.
Human nature (greed) is never the problem, because it cannot be changed. Focus only on what can be changed. Design a system that manages human nature, pointing it in a direction that is beneficial, while taming its side effects.
A denial of human nature is how you get authoritarian socialism with centralized planning, which leads to catastrophe because of the local knowledge problem, and because people have no private incentive to do anything.
"Capitalism" is an incomplete first step towards a system which channels greed into something that's beneficial for all stakeholders. A profit-driven actor making their production more efficient to increase profits is a good thing for everyone.
But capitalism is incomplete because the profit-motive can become pathological. Market failures are commonplace.
The only solution that is proven to work is a mixed economy done right, with clever and lean regulations, and a government not influenced by money, and with the government stepping in occasionally to provide public goods that the market cannot, and with private actors otherwise free to make profits as long as they are not harming any third parties.
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>I would argue that greed is the problem, not profit.
I would point out that's precisely what the "private equity firm"--is that true or just a buzzword? no private equity group is taking this library private--is saying about the current library, that the greed of the unionized employees is running the library for their own benefit and at great cost to library and at the expense of the public, and it could be run more efficiently. So, you agree with them at least that much.
>Somewhere along the line people forgot the lessons of the 20th century. They forgot that profit goes beyond a line on the current financial statement.
huh? that wasn't "the lesson of the 20th century". if anything, the 20th century represents democracy and market capitalism's greatest joint achievement, with much less disease and starvation and much more freedom at the end vs the beginning.
you live in one of the greatest times to be alive, and all you can do is complain. when and where from the past would you rather live out your life expectancy of half what it is now, coupled with no HN to bitch on?
Totally agree. I think another angle to look at it is not "a couple sectors" but "a certain scale", as suggested by your remark about how companies consolidate. When businesses are small and need every customer, they are motivated to do a good job at what they do, build goodwill, protect their reputation. The larger they become, the more they tend to work against their customers rather than for them. They cross multiple markets, making them less responsive to the demands of any one. They become "too big to fail". And so on.
What we see in the modern era is a system in which success is defined as becoming large enough that your customers have no other option but to deal with you. That's not a healthy system.
You see that scale problem everywhere. Once a business has become large, it no longer cares about “small” costs like unused buildings. That’s basically the reason so many buildings in towns and cities can be left unused for decades.
The impact it has on that town is often huge. But for the business, it’s just a small overhead. A small landlord couldn’t afford to leave their asset unproductive. A multinational conglomerate can.
The death of local high streets is in part due to the unwillingness of landlords to actually rent their properties out for market rate.
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> Just look at health insurance companies for a prime example: they make profit by denying claims.
Ok but why do people pick those insurance companies?
We see this across the board too and not just insurance companies. Governments low to pick the lowest bidder who then has massive cost overruns which has to put them above the second lowest bid in the end. Why is counter party risk never accounted for?
> Ok but why do people pick those insurance companies?
Because they are bundled with their job and most people don't have a choice?
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Is there a way to reward and incentivize improving human well being?
Perhaps a society where all income comes from the government in proportion to how much one improves the overall well being of society?
(Yes, it's difficult to measure this objectively, and even harder to agree on what the priorities for societal well being are)
Germany has a different structure for company ownership than the USA. Members representing relevant stakeholders (employees, the community, environment, etc.) must be present on the board and advocate for their interests.
UBI would go a long ways to enforcing democracy. Money talks, so just give people money. Everything else is too abstract. We can't seem to encode justice into law but at least if everyone got UBI it would be harder to oppress poor people
(half serious)
It’s not difficult, it’s impossible under freedom of religion and just independent thought generally.
One person’s “well being” might be measured by how many wives and children you have. Another’s might be education level and physical fitness. Another’s could be financial independence.
These all clash with each other in fundamentally incompatible ways.
> And with fewer competitors, it’s easier and easier for entrenched
so the problem isn't with profit after all, it's with low competition? So what is causing the lack of competition in the sector? Why can't that problem be fixed?
> A focus on profit is so frequently completely opposed to human wellbeing and a flourishing society.
Not surprising considering the profit is taken from people in the society.
Public-private "partnerships" backed by private equity will always raise prices, cut costs arbitrarily, reduce service, take out loans, and saddle the organization with debt to pay themselves huge dividends before driving it into bankruptcy. This is what happens when corrupt, unregulated capitalism is allowed to run amok and have zero skin in the game except to extract maximum profit like vampires.
Health insurance isn’t a great example. Profits are capped relative to premium costs so denying claims isnt a good strategy.
The only way denying claims can become a profit booster is to deny enough that premiums can be lowered enough to bring over more new members than was lost in revenue through the premium discount.
So denied claims come from people shopping for the cheapest insurance coverage possible.
how do we fight this?
There is even worse, genocide profiteers. [1]
[1] https://www.un.org/unispal/document/a-hrc-59-23-from-economy...
Conceptually neoliberal societys do not have a strong way to seperate community and social goals from economic ones, because their very philosophy is that prosperity creates social improvement.
Meanwhile everyone is living in low trust economic zones with no community observable, other than anonymous services.
this narrative is basically a lie
1) Americans spend less than OECD average out of pocket as a percentage of healthcare costs. This is much larger in absolute terms but the multiplier - cost of healthcare is nearly entirely due to provider costs.
2) Health outcomes are really different between states despite having basically the same system. demographically controlled iirc outcomes are not different and sometimes better (e.g. japanese americans).
3) Insurance company profits are pretty low relative to cost of healthcare. while the bureaucracy is more expensive its not "catastrophically" by any means and iirc there are oecd countries with similar overhead although im too lazy to search on myvphone.
4) Rationing healthcare has to and does happen in all advanced economies. again modulo cost in the us, id rather it happen via money than government or inforrmal scarcity (like in Canada).
4a) Frankly while i dont have evidence for this 4a, lookinng at us spending by age (and eg the enormous money usg spends on kidney dialysis for people thay mostly just die in a few years anyway), I wonder if an important reason US providers are so expensive is, we ration limited supply properly for most people but then don't ration keeping a bedridden grandma alive for 6 more months at extreme cost, cause hey, the govt pays.
> Just look at health insurance companies for a prime example: they make profit by denying claims
Despite being from Europe, I find this to be a shocking and erroneous interpretation.
Clearly, health insurances have the duty to allocate limited resources (“premiums”) across members. Denying and accepting claims is the mechanism to that end. Accepting all claims would increase premiums and reduce membership (by pricing people out). Would that an ideal state? Clearly not.
The point was not that all claims should be accepted. It's that adding a profit incentive to denials leads to worse outcomes.
Healthcare debates in the United States are difficult because so many assume that insurers have very high profit margins and that arbitrarily denying claims is the reason they have high profit margins.
If you look at the actual profit margins it’s low single digit percentages. You could eliminate profits altogether and virtually nothing would change. We even have non-profit insurers to look at
It’s strange how the high prices of drugs and services aren’t drawing the ire of people who complain about costs. Drug prices are nearly 3X higher here than international averages and doctors here also earn a lot more with in many cases fewer restrictions on prescribing or offering services than in most EU countries.
The meme that insurance company denials are generating huge profits comes mostly from the public murder of a health insurance CEO last year. For some reason people assumed that insurance companies and their profits must therefore be the core problem with high costs, without making the effort to see where the money actually goes in our health care system.
As you said, there is no health care system which does not have approval processes, deny requests deemed unnecessary, require step therapy, and establish standards of care.
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While the critique is valid, that does not offer a path to the solution.
Utilitarism is the ruling moral philosophy, and the only possible countermeasure is externalities but that depends on an effective government which is even more unlikely that asking for ethical behavior to corporations.
That may be widely believed but there are plenty of government institutions that actually function well. Libraries are a good example.
What’s more: the belief in govt “inefficiency” is one of the hardest to overcome factors that makes it hard to build good institutions, leading to a vicious cycle.
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Public utilities and services are the default and work well in the majority of developed countries. This is true for everything from local transport to water distribution. As the joke says "universal healthcare is so difficult to get right that only all developed countries except the US have managed to put it in place".
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> Just look at health insurance companies for a prime example: they make profit by denying claims.
This has been repeated so many times that I think people don’t understand just how small the profit margins are for health insurers. Low to middle single digit percentages. As low as 2-3% in recent years, and much lower than the average S&P 500 corporation.
There are also non-profit insurance companies out there. Their rates are not appreciably different, as you’d expect after seeing how low the profit margins are in for-profit insurers.
I also think people don’t realize that countries with nationalized health care also deny procedures, have pre-approval processes, require step therapy, and will not authorize procedures they don’t believe to be medically necessary or to have enough evidence. There is no health care system in the world which will simply approve and pay for every request.
So while health insurer profit margins are convenient bogeyman, if you deleted their profits entirely from the system it wouldn’t move the needle on costs. It also wouldn’t open the floodgates for approving everything, because no health care system will allow unlimited services. The amount of excess and unnecessary care would be astronomically expensive. I do agree that we need a more robust system in place for ensuring that incorrect denials don’t happen, but health insurance profit margins are barely a blip on the overall cost of health care in the United States.
It’s a combination of high prices for services, American’s unusually high utilization of health care services, and very high rates of drug prescribing that mostly contribute to the cost. I think most Americans would be surprised to discover that a lot of nations with nationalized health care would also be restrictive in their access to many services and prescription drugs. For as much as we talk about insurance companies denying claims, Americans still get far more services and prescriptions than most of their counterparts in other countries.
i have no doubt that other countries have some problems in their healthcare systems too, but i think you are downplaying a few key points:
1) united healthcare made 90 billion dollars gross profit in the last 12mo, and that's only one health insurance company. claiming that it's not a great business at a 2-3% profit margin ignores the scale of money involved, and ignores that the customer for health insurance is truly captive.
2) you're right that america has very high prices in healthcare. doesn't it seem bad that private insurance companies are incentivized to make things cost as much as possible so they can skim that 2-3% off the top? insurance companies negotiate and set prices for services and pharmaceuticals. they now own the pharmacy benefit management companies that would normally be incentivized to negotiate for lower prices.
i would expect in a public health care system that rejects procedures, they would follow consistent guidelines and rules. american health insurance companies will arbitrarily reject a percentage of procedures that they know they should be accepting in order to keep their profit margin in the right range.
i think it's hard for me to see the argument that health insurance companies are a net-positive or even net-neutral party in the united states. i don't think it's a coincidence that we have some of the highest prices and some of the worst outcomes.
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The insurer margins can be whatever small but when the same company also owns the hospital and drug distribution it doesnt matter.
Somebody in the process makes extreme margins.
Also americans cant be at same time avoiding going to hospital because of costs and “still get far more services than most of their counterparts in other countries”
Believe it or not there are countries where there is mandatory health insurance (your employer or you or state have to pay it) and doctors dont look at costs because they dont really know them. They for sure try to not be wasteful but nobody is second guessing obviously best treatment because it costs 40% more.
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Whatever. Simply come to a decent EU country and see how much it costs you for a bad cold or a cancer. Then compare that to the same event in the US.
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I'm interested in your point, but do you have any articles backing up your statements?
Oh bloody hell.
It astounds me how so many people can have such strong opinions about systems they have so little experience with.
I've lived long term in 4 countries (Canada, USA, Japan, Germany) and have dealt extensively with the medical systems in all of them (plus some experiences in Portugal and France).
Every system has its warts, and this is the first thing that naysayers will latch onto, of course. People love to use tu-quoque as a defense mechanism. "See? They're just as bad as we are because you have to wait sometimes, and look at this extreme case right here! It's probably even WORSE than us!"
The fact is, none of the systems are really that bad (with the EXCEPTION of the American system). There's a reason why travel insurance companies have two tiers: All of the world EXCEPT America, and all of the world INCLUDING America.
Have I had to wait for a procedure in Canada? Sure, but they do a pretty decent job of triaging, so yeah outside of the HORROR STORIES (of which you can find anywhere if you dig enough), it's pretty damn good. In Japan I paid a percentage of costs (which are pretty damn reasonable). In France I actually didn't have insurance, so I had to pay FULL price when I came down with pneumonia: 50 euros for the doctor and the antibiotics. In Portugal, I caught COVID, and got treatment within 2 hours of arriving at the hospital in Lisbon.
If you haven't actually been in the medical system of another country, you don't know what you're talking about.
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> I also think people don’t realize that countries with nationalized health care also deny procedures, have pre-approval processes, require step therapy, and will not authorize procedures they don’t believe to be medically necessary or to have enough evidence
Lines in private medical care are shorter because people with no insurance don't get in line.
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Interesting pattern here: manufacture a crisis (book banning complaints → funding cuts), then propose private "efficiency" as the solution. Meanwhile, this library was founded in 1799, is the second-oldest in Virginia, just won the 2024 state Library of the Year award, and had 400k+ checkouts last year. Hardly sounds broken.
I walk the corner to the rubble that used to be a library/ Line up to the mind cemetery now/ What we don't know keeps the contracts alive and movin'/ They don't gotta burn the books they just remove 'em
It worked so well in Europe with train companies, energy companies and local utilities.
And they keep going for it: in France the neoliberal government is pushing further the privatisation of railroad (they ask the national company to invest in the shared infrastructure, but spare the competition from this burden; then they will probably point out how the private competitors are more cost efficient), subway and buses in Paris, they renew the private management of public funded highways despite them being a cash machine, they let the public hospitals understaffed to the point that many medium sized cities do not have 24/7 access anymore to emergency services, and now many colleagues and friends of mine prefer to go in private hospitals
In American politics, this has been an incredibly successful strategy, most notably starting with Reagan. It's called "starving the beast" [1]. The playbook is simple:
1. Cut taxes
2. "Pay" for those tax cuts by cutting expenditure;
3. Those programs begin to fail because of the funding cuts;
4. Use those failures to justify further cuts, usually by privatizing something or some form of public-private partnership, which is nothing more than a transfer of government wealth to the already-wealthy.
We saw something similar play out recently with Jane Street in India [2], which seems to boil down to market manipulation between options and the underlying securities.
Back in the 1980s we had corporate raiders who were famous for buying up companies that were trading below book value and then simply breaking them up for parts and selling those parts. I'm sure this went as far as corporate raiders manipulating the price.
Private equity is the latest form of this cancer. Here's the PE playbook:
1. Raise a bunch of money;
2. Buy some company with a large amount of debt, a so-called leveraged buyout ("LBO");
3. Once you control the company, take out massive loans on the company's assets;
4. Sell off any real estate holdings, often to some interested party who most certainly isn't at arms length, possibly for a discounted price, to raise further capital then lease back those holdings you need, ideally with complicated leases that hie the true future cost;
5. Use those loans to pay back the original investors and loans;
6. Sell the debt-ridden husk to whoever is stupid enough to buy it.
Now (6) is the tricky part because you have to make it look like the company is profitable, that you've added value by cutting costs or otherwise increased efficiency. And you do that with complicated debt. Sort of like ARMs in the subprime crisis.
I cannot think of a single success story with PE that has created a successful company that hasn't imploded. I belive most PE funds lose money too. Why anyone would buy a company that a PE fund has gotten its hooks into is beyond me.
I suspect you can make a market-beating fund that simply follows the index but does not buy any PE-infected company.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
[2]: https://www.ft.com/content/6789512f-8775-450b-b0a6-9d9d0c371...
> Why anyone would buy a company that a PE fund has gotten its hooks into is beyond me.
From my own life experiences, I believe that, across a population, there is no correlation between the amount of money people have and their individual rational decision making ability.
> I cannot think of a single success story with PE that has created a successful company that hasn't imploded.
Safeway had a leveraged buyout in the 80s, and was so successful the merger/acquisition with Kroger was blocked due to monopoly concerns. Hilton also had a leveraged buyout.
PE exists to buy bargain bin companies and extract maximum value from them. Sometimes that’s actually rehabilitating the company. Usually they are just the best at milking a dying cow.
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By this point, I suspect that PE is simply a sophisticated liquidation service. Where an owner doesn't want to deal with a company anymore and want to cash out, but can't just easily sell everything. By this perspective, any fault on a company's discontinuation lies solely with whoever sold it to a PE as it's him who actually wants to kill it.
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"cannot think of a single success story with PE that has created a successful company that hasn't imploded. I belive most PE funds lose money too. Why anyone would buy a company that a PE fund has gotten its hooks into is beyond me."
It's funny that the narrative where a bunch of generally smart well connected people renowned for their greed set money on fire for decades doesn't make you rethink your priors.
There's actually a fair amount of research.
Pure performance https://www.nber.org/digest/jul12/private-equity-performance
Effects on employment and productivity E.g. https://www.nber.org/digest/feb20/economic-effects-private-e... Notable numbers for me are for public vs private firms. Apparently principal - agent problem is a real thing!
Tangential on how betting your own money is more efficient than other's https://www.nber.org/papers/w13061
For anyone curious about what books the group wanted banned:
https://www.advocate.com/news/front-royal-samuels-library-co...
Here's an opinion pledge where they stated their demands: https://royalexaminer.com/parents-matter-make-the-pledge/
It is worth noting that per the linked article below[0]. The library has a system for preventing readers under the age of 18 from accessing the books in the New Adult section of the library, and it's one that requires parents to opt into their child having access to those materials.
[0]: https://www.nvdaily.com/nvdaily/catholic-library-supporters-...
Books:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/91010302-you-need-to-chi... ref: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/16YUZFgYY2/
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53241064-this-is-why-the... ref: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/16kKwC3PDD/
Found the list: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vRzUaZiy2h4gi-c_...
The library should serve the entire community, not a loud minority or even exclusively the majority. If 20% of the community wants LGBTQ books, 30% don't, and 50% don't care, why should the 30% be able to decide that the other 20% shouldn't have access to these books? The majority should not be able to strip rights that the minority should have access to. Tyranny of the majority is a real thing.
I find it hard to believe that even a plurality wants these books banned. Do we have proportions, or is it just a number of complaints?
It's the loudness of the minority that wants them banned. That, and the fact that they are often people who have enough privilege (land owning, ability to take off work to go to council meetings, and (most importantly) own a business) to be able to throw around to get there way.
Happens a lot at universities and non profits. A big donor will sometimes only agree to donate if certain conditions are met, and as a result can strong arm the other party into whatever they want. The public sector is the same; At the local level it's often business owners that have enough influence over the local economy.
There's a whole essay by N. Taleb analyzing this phenomenon: https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
This all would be so much easier, if libraries could give out electronic books
… libraries can, and do, give out eBooks.
And frankly, it’s a library. Every group should have access to books they’re interested in. But that doesn’t mean those groups should be able to ban books they don’t like, even if 75% of people want to ban them.
My local library has stacks and stacks of steamy Christian romance and I’ve never once complained about them being a waste of money or space.
But the same library orders one copy of Heartstopper and all hell breaks loose.
I honestly cannot understand how having LGBTQ books in a library even affects people who don't like them. Just don't read the books. It's not like their eyeballs are being glued open and they're being forced to read them. Book banners are such weirdos.
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I'm curious how you would feel about your local library carrying The Turner Diaries, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or The Camp of the Saints? What percentage of the local population would have to want those books for you to believe the library should serve them?
Are there any books that a public community library should not be willing to carry?
I think that access to disinformation within a context such as a library is actually quite a good thing. You can read it, and then research it, and think critically about it. In an open ecosystem of information, with a little critical thought and media literacy, most people are able to spot bullshit when they need to.
Most University Libraries carry those text. I'm not sure if it would be particularly useful in the context of a public library (as the goal is to serve a local community with a wide range of needs). However, if there was interest then it would likely be put into circulation.
I would speculate that there was likely a time when each of those were on shelves, but they were likely weeded out due to lack of interest.
Do libraries carry Mein Kampf? Would the books you suggest be categorized and contextualized appropriately? (… like all other books, and a job that I believe librarians already perform.) "Categorized and contextualized appropriately" might also mean "not on the shelf / by request, but available for research"; a good many books that are considerably less objectionable and of greater literary value already are in libraries, as there is only so much shelf. Again, deciding what merits shelf space is a function of the librarian.
But you see no qualitative difference between {a book written by a white supremacist, neo-Nazi organization; a fabricated text (i.e., propaganda); and a book the SPLC describes as "'widely revered by American white supremacists' and 'a sort of anti-immigration analog to The Turner Diaries', and attributed its popularity to the plot's parallels with the white genocide conspiracy theory."} and "The book Pride Colors by Robin Stevenson, which explains the meaning of the rainbow colors in the Pride flag"[1]?
What is the literary value of white supremacist drivel or a fabricated text to a community library? (I'd wager approximately none.) Versus the books being complained about (anything and everything LGBTQ+). (Definite value from helping people exploring LGBTQ+ topics for themselves, simply trying to learn about LGBTQ people, to helping non-homophobic parents raise inclusive, tolerant children who don't want to spread hate & intolerance, and which need only be checked out by those who actually desire to read them.) There is demand for books of the nature being banned here; I cannot see there being anywhere near the same demand for books filled with bile.
And again, the empirical position (and for some subsets, outright stated position) of the right is to remove any and all traces of LGBTQ media from libraries. (And more broadly, from society, as well.)
In this particular instance[1], we can see this in one of the complaints:
> “Our library should not be carrying ANY material about LGBT,” one person wrote.
and,
> “Family has 2 moms — unacceptable,” the person wrote of another book. They also complained, “This book makes LGBTQ+ look ‘harmless’ and acceptable.”
Someone else points out exactly your quip; what about equal representation?
> She continued, “You said taxation without representation. What about my representation in the library? What about what I want my children to read? What about the 4 percent [of] LGBTQ members in your community that you represent that only get 1 percent of the books? Are they not being represented fairly with their tax dollars?”
In the broader national debate, we've seen this pattern endlessly; "protect the children" is a wedge to open a fissure towards a wholesale and complete ban. E.g., see the FL Don't Say Gay Act, which started as objections that education on such topics needed to be "age appropriate" but was then subsequently expanded until is was a wholesale ban on education of numerous topics.
[1]: https://www.advocate.com/news/front-royal-samuels-library-co...
Was it really adults trying to prevent other adults from those materials, or trying to prevent minors from accessing adult materials? (I'll interpret downvotes without response as confirmation of the latter, and that people want minors accessing adult material.)
> Was it really adults trying to prevent other adults from those materials, or trying to prevent minors from accessing adult materials?
This dichotomy is false. Many challenges were trying to prevent children and adolescents from accessing age appropriate materials. A number of challenges asserted the books were unsuitable for any age. Or called for the library to purge or destroy them.[1][2]
> (I'll interpret downvotes without response as confirmation of the latter, and that people want minors accessing adult material.)
Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.[3]
Who did you think would be impressed by an announcement you would interpret down votes in bad faith?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If it mirrors national trends, then some of both (but lots of the latter).
I love Front Royal. I'm also not surprised private equity tried to buy the library there. Money has been corrupting Northern Virginia for too long.
I increasingly think that our society isn't sustainable without some recalibration of the notion of responsibility, liability, justice and due process. The problem we face is that it is very easy for unscrupulous operators to exploit loopholes and cause lots of damage, but the process for holding them accountable faces a heavy burden of proof and itself can be exploited (e.g., by dragging out lawsuits for years).
We need some kind of sliding scale where certain actions by people who either "should have known better" (i.e., are exploiting insider knowledge) or "had no basis for acting" (i.e., are rich enough to not need to make any more money) can be quickly curtailed without a need to specifically prove everything that they did. Something loosely akin to "if you had a billion dollars, you'd better be able to affirmatively prove you did everything squeaky clean or we're just going to take $500 million".
Brendan Ballou’s book “Plunder” is an excellent read about the effects of private equity across industries, if you want to go deeper on the topic. I recently had him on my podcast talking about the effects of PE in HVAC. There are quirks in each realm but the themes are common (I guess in libraries, too).
Here’s that episode if any of you are curious: https://www.heatpumped.org/p/plunder-how-private-equity-is-r...
Is there anything provided by the state for people and not for profit in the US?
What is their business proposition here?
America has some very good public services. None perfect but many good. I don't understand when American try to tear them down.
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You're accusing the article of being one sided, while espousing a view that to most on here is going to seem one sided. "They want to contract it out to a contractor." This completely leaves out that the contractor is also trying to get the transaction to happen, or at least to improve the likelihood.
So if some article offends your sensibilities enough to call it stupid, maybe give a more balanced take.
You're just getting confused by the article, it seems. Nowhere in the article does it make any specific claims about LS&S is "trying to get the transaction to happen", rather it makes vague begging-the-question claims that it's a "takeover attempt". It's probably a slick way to make people assume the conclusion was proved somehow, without actually doing it.
But, on another level, what in the holy name of my increasingly annoyed sensibilities are you even talking about? A contractor wants a contract? Did IBM bid on the healthcare.gov job? What did LS&S do that IBM didn't?
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If the current public management is bad, the solution should be to bring in new public management. The fact that the alternative is private equity should be the indication that this fight is purely ideological rather than a fight against bad management.
It's a non-profit, they can't just replace their management.
They've created a new library board charged with determining how to provide library services in the county: https://www.nvdaily.com/nvdaily/warren-supervisors-appoint-n...
Based on my experience with county boards of supervisors and their interactions with library management and library funding decisions, the Warren County Board of Supervisors' statement that the library has poor management shouldn't be given much credence unless backed up by evidence.
Somewhat amusingly, the library is a subordinate of the county. If the library is in fact poorly managed, the poor management is the fault of the board of supervisors.
If doing a bad job is being the 2024 Virginia library of the year I doubt it.
It really depends on how "library of the year" is determined.
Some years back now, our local library got a new boss who was determined to do everything the new and modern way. In the process, the boss drove away half of the paid staff, I don't know what fraction of the volunteer staff, and the entire community support organization. But hey, those are all old people and their values clearly don't matter (who cares if they're the ones with tons of free time?). Help, I don't have the money or people to run programs anymore! Better run away and get another job. Now, the library still exists but a lot of people are going to the next town over, and the new new boss is struggling to rebuild from scratch.
It would be completely unsurprising if "do things the modern way" and "chases awards" are significantly overlapped without corresponding to "improves things for the actual users", and "support LGBT" is code for "gerontophobia".
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Might be a case of ginned up accusations of “poor management” to cover for political animus.
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I understand the concern about local accountability, and you're absolutely right that libraries should be responsive to their communities. But the data here suggests the broader community was actually supporting the library.
Most public libraries follow professional collection development standards that try to serve their entire diverse community including families who want those books available. It's a tough balance, but the goal is usually having something for everyone rather than letting any single group determine what everyone else can access.
The community seems to have spoken pretty clearly by successfully defending their library. Sometimes the loudest voices aren't representative of the broader sentiment.
Your comment is inline with how the libraries operate, and I can't tell if some of the others here are just a little homophobic or just woefully misinformed about how libraries function.
Books that aren't being circulated frequently enough get weeded and removed from the collection, usually once or twice a year. Moreover, if books are requested frequently from other branches, or have long hold times, then that volume will typically be added to a collection.
This is against the ethics standards of the ALA, and the entire philosophy that underpins libraries as a whole.
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And why stop at LGBTQ books? Remove anything that I or my religion don't like!
And why stop at removing them? Burn them!
Whoa, so much smoke! Better repeatedly wave it away from my chest with an outstretched, downward-facing palm!
So are you saying they shouldn't be accountable to elected officials?
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peak capitalism :/
Billionaires buy elections, elected officials break funding for public facilities, billionaires get tax cuts, public facilities get bought out with tax cuts.
I wonder when they start introducing their own currencies like in the old mining towns.
Back to feudalism we go, election by election.
This title is misleading because the library is already owned by private equity.
>Providing for a community night not be profitable, but that doesn't make it wrong
>Efficiency shouldn't always be a goal
If you don't care about profit or efficiency then you are being wasteful and are not effectively delivering value.
Where did you get the idea it was already owned by private equity?
A public library delivers value to a community. Profit is not necessary for that, and can be argued to actually be harmful to delivering value to a community.
Efficiency might not deliver maximum value either when the community is the focus. Something taking a little more time or involving more human effort can actually be fulfilling for those doing and receiving. Firing the librarian that knows all the childrens' names so you can have a kiosk instead isn't delivering value.
> A public library delivers value to a community.
Well, a subset at best. I've moved to a new town where the sole library is available to normal 9-5 workers for three hours on a Saturday morning. I don't even know what it stocks because it just isn't open when most people would be able to use it.
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The library is owned by Samual Library Inc which is not the government or a public company.
Profit is not neccessary to deliver value, but it helps optimize it.
If someone knowing kids names is worth it people would be willing to pay more for the service. If people would rather pay less and use kiosks then that may be a better option.
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Are you saying all public services need to turn a profit?
It should be a long term goal. At the very least the perspective of how it is being run needs to be thought of in terms of profit.
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Was writing this comment a way to drive profit and efficiency?