> If they are a great idea, why not persuade people to voluntarily pay for them?
Because, in this specific case, the people who most need libraries can often barely afford to pay for food and shelter.
Libraries are such an obvious public good that I will never understand why they're not treated (both in the US and in the UK, and perhaps in other countries), as a basic and absolute necessity.
[edited to add not which I left out in my rush to get my point across]
I meant persuade people with money to pay for them.
You value them. Why don't you pay something voluntarily? And a thousand other yous? Why doesn't Bill Gates throw some money at it if it's a super efficient use of resources?
He will, and many other non-poor people will, if they are persuaded it's a better use of their resources than Greenpeace, Oxfam, malaria medicine for Africa, clean water for Africa, and so on.
If such people can't be persuaded of this -- that it's an efficient use of resources -- then that's no time to send the tax man to take their money for this purpose and divert it away from the purposes they judge to be more important.
Is it really so hard for you to imagine prisoners dilemmas and tragedies of the commons?
I'm willing to pay $1 for a public good if everyone else pays $1. But it is utterly irrational for me to pay voluntarily for this public good, for at least two reasons: 1) since most people won't be paying for it, if I want it I'll have to pay much more, and 2) whether or not it exists is entirely independent of my actions anyway, so why pay a thing?
In order for fundamentalist libertarianism to work it will need to come up with a solution to the free-rider problem. Got one?
It's a philosophical argument, not an evidence-based argument. Do you have a criticism of it other than that you are an empiricist who dislikes philosophy? Do you have a rival idea which isn't refuted?
Philosophers use evidence all the time in support of their arguments, especially when they are making empirical claims (as you are: you are claiming that the costs of government outweigh the benefits when it comes to the provision of public goods). If you choose to not use evidence, then it is important to be far more careful and charitable than you have been. E.g., in your "simple argument" you only consider examples at the extreme (million -x benefit or 1% ROI). These are straw men -- you don't in fact deal with any kind of realistic example.
For your reasoning to have been good and fair, you would have had to consider the scenario that puts your position in the worst possible light and then show that it still holds. Imagine a dam that costs $100 but provides $10,000 of benefit to 20 users. Imagine, further, that all 20 users are competing with each other for status and customers, they are all roughly equally wealthy, and that paying for the dam will be a significant expense for most of them. Even though the dam could be built by any five of the users, any user who doesn't pay will gain a comparative advantage over the others. The libertarian might propose that they collectively participate in a contract. But why should anyone agree to participate in this contract, if they know that the dam will be built irrespective of their participation, and if they will get an advantage over others by not participating? No doubt the hold-outs will claim that they can't afford to pay for it, or that they don't want it -- but this is just a negotiating strategy.
Sure, setting up a government to deal with the provision of a single collective good is extremely inefficient. The issue is that there are many thousands of such public goods (and services). The empirical argument, here, is that on balance the inefficiency is worth it.
It does not appear, from your essay, that you have carefully and sympathetically examined the relevant counter-positions. If you haven't already looked at it carefully, I would recommend http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/free-rider/
It is interesting that free market fundamentalists seem to have trouble deciding whether their argument is an empirical or a philosophical/moral/ideological one. They will claim that libertarianism is the answer because government-based collective action is always less efficient (an empirical claim). When evidence is provided that this need not always be true, they switch to an argument of "freedom" and natural rights. When this argument is shown wanting, they then revert to their efficiency-related arguments. This flip-flop frequently works to fool many, it seems.
> Philosophers use evidence all the time in support of their arguments, especially when they are making empirical claims (as you are: you are claiming that the costs of government outweigh the benefits when it comes to the provision of public goods).
That's a moral not empirical claim. You can't measure what is morally better than what.
Also that isn't my claim: I said nothing about what outweighs what, and I object to such arguments.
You complain that I don't give a sympathetic reading to free rider problems -- without details, presumably simply because you disagree with me -- but then what do you do? You characterize my views grossly inaccurately by throwing in a bunch of your own assumptions.
HN has terrible UI for finding new replies to comments like this, where they are nested under other comments I wrote, so I don't intend to check again. If you want to have a serious discussion and perhaps learn something, reply at: http://groups.google.com/group/rational-politics-list?hl=en
One of the (many) flaws with libertarian dogma is the assumption that a person can be intelligently informed about every aspect that might affect them, from social effects of libraries to air quality to choosing services right down to who picks up the garbage. Building regulations? Who needs those, right? Let's just replace it by doing 'buyer beware' and making every purchaser of a property have to do an in-depth research of everything, down to what kind of metal the pipes were made out of.
Volunteer charity also only works for <i>visible</i> problems. There's no need for it to go away, but to suggest it could replace (and improve on!) governmental social services is just silly. Everyone gave money to Katrina funds... when it happened. What percentage of the original donators were still donating 6 months later? 12 months? 24 months? Same question for Haiti. Private charity is good for the initial burst for visible causes, but it sucks for ongoing support on the grand scale.
Libraries are good for the majority of people who can't afford them.
People who have the money to support them, don't need them.
By the time there are enough sufferers, and discontented others who create an externality where libraries are useful, the solution for those who can afford it is personal protection.
Do you have any information about the cable TV subscription rates of the poor, or are you just trotting out bullshit theories of poverty as lack of impulse control and proper priority setting that were already dusty when Reagan took office?
edit: That is definitely information. Appreciate the references (that were given as a reply to the other comment.) Will look at them later to see if they answer the question that came to mind as I was reading your numbers; what's the churn? How many people were in that 14% during any particular period?
For example, if I did a survey during a famine to find out how many people had a meal that day, and found out 2/3s had, it would be incorrect to say that only 1/3 of people had been effected.
And you know they can afford cable tv how, exactly?
Because the US government did a survey measured this. I link to the raw data in a separate post on this thread, currently downmodded for reasons unknown.
First, let it be said that reading through your comments in this thread has driven me to drinking. I'm heading out to the local watering hole, but, before I do, I want to make a couple of points.
First, a library is most assuredly a public good in that it provides services that it can only provide which are not directed at profit-making. It serves many civic purposes and provides many services to the community. This is empirically true. It can be observed. Go to a public library in a city center and you will observe these functions being carried out to the great good of the patrons and the community at large. Your links to Wikipedia notwithstanding, you've made no real argument that libraries do not provide the public goods of communal learning, discourse, shared meeting spaces, free internet access (in intervals). I'm sure you'll go read your Wikipedia definition and come back to split hairs, but it really comes down to the notion of shared services and their potential for enriching the lives of the people in a given community. You've exhibited a great disdain for such here. It's distasteful, but I'm accustomed to it here on the internet, where every engineer who read a Rand novel got the idea that he was John Galt. So it goes.
Second, you've brought in this cable TV nonsense, as if it reveals that the poor are in fact not poor at all because they've found a way to scrape together enough money to enjoy just one small pleasure. Would you like to commission a study on how many poor children eat one or more pieces of candy during a given month? Would that vindicate your view that nobody is poor and that nobody benefits from shared services and that people with less money and opportunity than you are all lazy idiots looking for a way to mooch off of your bootstrapped successes? I think not. I think you'd still be dissatisfied after having ripped off the mask of those greedy little children in the bad neighborhoods, pretending to be poor while eating a piece of candy now and then. For shame! It's almost as bad as having a Playstation! You went looking for these data points as if they prove something. You went looking for data with a clear agenda. You didn't point out how few of these households have usable kitchen appliances or access to healthy, affordable foods. You didn't check out their schools. No, you went looking for evidence that nobody's really poor. I wish you were right.
Third, instead of picking on public libraries, let's talk about the NSF grant that you say is funding your own lifestyle on your homepage at NYU. Is that a public good? I'm paying for scientific research. You're sucking just as hard on the government teat as anybody. Shouldn't you explain to us why it's worth it when our libraries aren't? The truth is, I'm a big believer in funding scientific research and public libraries. You seem to want it both ways here, though. You want to bash libraries as useless and go on and on with these badly built, parsing arguments. Why don't you feel the same way about NSF grants? Are those a public good? I'd say by your criteria, they are not, since a grant for you means no grant for somebody else. I suspect that your logic only really applies to those less motivated, less gifted souls who haunt the dim and sad hallways of our dying public libraries. Is that it?
Fourth, your attitudes here, I'm sure, seem logical to you and your friends on the internet who love John Galt as much as you do. But these economic and social issues are about outcomes in systems which are (effectively) infinitely complex. And they carry moral weight. Your approach to these questions, in their selfishness and proud disregard for your fellow man and neighbor, is, as Gore Vidal described Ayn Rand's philosophy, "almost perfect in its immorality." An easier way of saying that is that you just sound like a dick. Sure, you're pompous and kind of a smartass, but that's most of us here in computerland. But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about how painfully careless you are with the hopes, the well-being, or simply the lives of others. You reduce our collective existence to atomic miseries, as if you've escaped most of them by your own virtue rather than through a series of accidents. You place blame where it isn't due and heap glory where it doesn't belong.
You can call it libertarianism. I just call it being an asshole.
See you at the library (not now - I'm headed to the bar).
...public goods of communal learning, discourse, shared meeting spaces, free internet access...
Just because you stick the word "public good" and "free" in front of something you want other people to pay for doesn't make those services non-rivalrous and non-excludible.
As for NSF grants (note: webpage is way outdated, haven't been at NYU for years), the theory behind their public benefit is that published scientific research helps everyone - you are free to build a medical or other device based on the basic research I published.
I'm not going to defend this empirically since I'm unconvinced it's true. The large chunks of grants pilfered by universities, the paywalled publications, and the patented inventions exploited by universities seriously undermine the public benefits.
Because, in this specific case, the people who most need libraries can often barely afford to pay for food and shelter.
Libraries are such an obvious public good that I will never understand why they're not treated (both in the US and in the UK, and perhaps in other countries), as a basic and absolute necessity.
[edited to add not which I left out in my rush to get my point across]