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Our Radical Socialist Library System is Incompatible with True Liberty, I.e. Market Fundamentalism (IRONY)

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Just have a look at this, and remind yourself how those who hate freedom are ever thinking of new devious plots to undermine the world we have created:

http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/society/libraries-have-terrible-business-model-says-government-20160330107603

I salute the courage of the individual who wrote this. And I would like to add my own thoughts.

Our malevolent librarian apologists and their supine fellow travellers simply don't understand the key problem, which is the vexed question of resource allocation. To focus purely on the mere envious and futile desires of library users without taking into consideration the problem of distribution and our inherent Hayekian constraints on knowledge is a very naive and idealistic way of approaching the paper economy. How on earth are we supposed to KNOW who gets what book, when, and under what circumstances?

Just stop and think for a moment: this is a dizzying conundrum on a colossal scale, with which our minuscule technocratic intellects are simply powerless to engage! It would be nice if libraries worked out in practice, but given the intrinsic constraints on all human knowledge and the necessarily asymmetrical allocation of information, the empty opium dream of 'functioning libraries' must be ultimately condemned as the futile fantasy of highminded, disillusioned leftist radicals and ideologues.

Now, some may object that this not the key problem. Well, yes, that is true enough. It's not the key problem, but then again, as all ends are finally incommensurable with one another, all we have to work on are a battery of highly selective means to achieve the arbitrarily selected ends in question.

Yup! It's all in Ludwig Von Mises, you know!

I think we should run our libraries like we run our foreign policy in the US, UK and other civilized, prosperous, Anglo-Saxon nations. Why don't we just let the market decide who gets what? After all, we don't have any moralistic 'ends-based' scruples about whom we bomb and whom we don't. This being fairly clear and self-evident, I ask you: given that the choice of ends is inevitably a matter of absolute indifference (how on earth can we know if pushpin or poetry are superior?), we should also run our libraries like we run our vassals and our client states.

If someone wants to get something from us, we don't just reward the audacity of freeloaders with a handout. We ask them what they can give us in exchange.

And if anybody gets uppity when we try to establish a free contract on an equal footing, well:

We'll just see what happens.

You have been warned!

Signed Jonathan Swiftboat 01 April 2016

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Jonathan Ferguson is a socio-economic liberal with strong libertarian leanings in some key issues.

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